 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 the premier developer show for containers. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. Our flagship program, we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier. It's my co-host, Brian Graceley, our cloud analyst at theCUBE and Wikibon. Our next guest is Jason McGee, who's the IBM Fellow VP, CTO of the IBM Cloud Platform. Was on last year. Welcome back. Thanks. Good to see you. So you're doing a lot of drone demos. But I got to ask you the first question. Last year we were in the little hallway of the hotel. Fire Marshall's picking us in. Now again, continues to expand here. What's the update on IBM with containers? Give us a quick highlight on your update from last year to this year. What progress have you guys made? What cool things are you guys announcing? Yeah, so it's been a big year for us on containers. You know, we've been part of the ecosystem from the beginning and doing some really amazing things on Bluemix with containers. Last year at the DockerCon, we were just launching our IBM container service on Bluemix. So, you know, high performance, production, container hosting on our cloud platform. Last year, we've got just amazing adoption from clients. And you know, as you see here at the show, it's just an incredible increase in just interest around the container space. So I got to ask you someone who's on the inside of IBM Cloud. Bluemix, we've watched really, we were actually, I think IBM Pulse was the one of the best. We announced, you guys announced Bluemix. And the growth of Bluemix has been phenomenal just in features, but also the market's been rapidly exploding. Yes, absolutely. You guys manage that, and what's the key things, what keeps you at pace with that? Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. I mean, the adoption in cloud is just incredible and Bluemix continues to grow. I mean, we're at 20,000 new users a week signing up for the platform. I think one of the big things you've seen is kind of just the, this kind of expansion of cloud into a full-fledged platform. You know, two, three years ago when we were starting Bluemix we had platform as a service and we had infrastructure and they're very separate. And you know, you've seen kind of Bluemix blossom into this full platform of containers and cloud foundry and event-oriented programming and just an incredible diversity of kind of runtime capabilities. And then just amazing services. Like we were talking a little earlier about Watson and Cognitive and all these amazing APIs that are out there. So just seeing just the adoption of all those rich capabilities really grow over the last couple years. Yeah, so this morning, you know, Ben talked about, you know, Paz and he talked about CAS and kind of, you know, it's a very container-centric world. You know, you just mentioned it. You've got OpenWhisk, which is, you know, serverless functional. You've got BlueBox, which lets you do VMs. You've got, you know, containers. You can do native containers, cloud. I mean, you guys have a much broader view of what you need from a cloud perspective. You've got a tie-in services. You know, where do containers fit in Bluemix? And then where's the, you know, how does the bigger picture pan out? Yeah, I think all those labels are really kind of meaningless on some levels. I mean, if you look at a modern cloud platform, it has to span the spectrum. You know, if you look at customer workloads, some people are doing microservices and cloud-native and building new applications and they also have a whole bunch of legacy that they want to bring to the cloud. So our perspective is you kind of need a spectrum from bare metal to VMs, to containers, to, you know, opinionated containers of Cloud Foundry to Ben-oriented. And I think that container space in the middle kind of maybe is in the middle for a reason because I think that's where maybe the bulk of the momentum is really moving is a lot of new application developments going to happen around containers. This great blend of kind of flexibility and speed and agility that you get with containers. I think that's why so many people are here because they see, you know, that benefit on both sides. Well, you need the other tool. You need urban code. You need, you know, develop tools. You need Watson to help you do analytics. And I mean, you need all those things, I think, to sort of make it out. You need all the CI CD tools and you need like all the services. Maybe that's one of the lessons the broader container ecosystem hasn't quite latched onto yet is that as great as Docker is and containers are, not everything's going to be a container. And there's a lot of capability that'll be exposed as APIs and services. And you got to bring those into the platform in a first class way too. What's a developer market look like from a customer perspective? Obviously you guys have a lot of experience in the enterprise. And the enterprise application market is really exploding. A lot of energy, positive energy. They have legacy. So hybrid is going to be the winning strategy. So as I look at the Docker opportunity, how do you guys segment out and communicate to customers around where Docker fits and where the rest of IBM stuff exists and how does the next bridge that? Yeah, so I think, you know, we've been telling the hybrid story for a long time. And I think over the last year or two, we've seen more people come to our perspective that hybrid is just the end state that everyone's going to be in. You know, we're going to have this mixed environment. And I've always felt that container technology like Docker plays this really important role in providing the portability that you need to move across those environments. Because where you want to run is going to change over time. And so, you know, we're positioning and enabling Docker to be used in that way, to be used as the kind of heart of a portable hybrid application. And I think if you look at the rest of the IBM portfolio, they're adapting in that way too. So we're taking a lot of our existing middleware like WebSphere and converting it into those formats. So talk about your relationship with Docker, Inc. and Docker ecosystem. Two different things. Two different things, but you know, tied together. IBM, you've been acting to share some insight into what you guys have done, what you guys are doing with both Docker, Inc. and Docker ecosystem. So we absolutely are active participants in both on the community side. We're helping contribute to the Docker project. We have contributors and core maintainers on the Docker project that work at IBM and kind of helping shepherd that forward and also been working a lot on things like the open container initiative and cloud native computing foundation to put the right governance model around containers. On the commercial side, you know, we're Docker's first commercial go-to-market partner, first partner in the enterprise, first to provide enterprise support for Docker. And so we integrate with their offerings. We go to market together. We sell together, you know, great stories like ADP, who was up on stage today, big IBM customer, running Docker on the mainframe, on ZLinux. You know, they're a joint customer of ours where we're kind of working together to bring this thing to pass. Yeah, IBM does a lot of things. I mean, I was coming out of here on the plane, was watching the US Open, I'm clicking on it, you know, 100, everybody's keeping up with stuff. You guys learning a lot about real-time things. You're covering the masters, you're covering, you know, like the Tonys or the Academy Awards. Like how does that then, you know, kind of apply to people who go like, hey, I want to do real-time for IoT, which I might be, you know, how do those learnings from one domain apply to another? Do you find customers or are looking for that expertise for you guys? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, both just us providing kind of that expertise as, you know, consulting to those people. But more importantly, you know, we gain a lot of learning from running those events and running those high-scale, you know, mission critical. I mean, nothing is more kind of mission critical on a sporting event. You get it wrong, it's over. Like there's no going back, you can't try again, you have to get it right when it matters. And we take all that learning and we apply it to the solutions we're building, we apply it to how we architect our cloud platform. And you know, we've been doing that with the Olympics and with the Masters and all kinds of things over the years. And that's really, you know, part of the heritage of IBM. I think one of our great strengths is we've built a lot of these applications for many years. We really understand at a deep level how to build cloud and how to build highly available performance systems. Jason, what's the coolest thing that people gravitate to when you guys put out the, you know, the IBM portfolio of stuff that you're working on. You got a whisk out there, which we mentioned briefly. You're showing some stuff here. With respect to containers and Docker. Sure. Get your booth or in general, just anecdotally, what do you see people gravitate towards through the IBM technology? Yeah, it's probably a couple of things. I mean, you know, maybe not Docker related directly, but Watson and those capabilities that have are absolutely a big draw to our platform. And of course, a lot of the Watson services, one of the things we talked about the show this week is Watson itself is built on top of containers and Docker. And we use that technology internally. On our core cloud platform, a lot of draw to our container service on Bluemix and really this, you know, we're doing something very unique. We're running containers in cloud on bare metal with a native Docker interface. Like you don't have to deploy Docker engines. You don't deploy VMs. You just come to the cloud and run containers. And I think for the developers here that really resonates because they can get to what they want to do. I just want to get my applications running on cloud and not have to worry about setting up infrastructure. How about orchestration and microservices, the future of those critical factors? So clearly microservices are a common use case around the container space. Lots of interesting opinions in the market about how to do microservices. One of the things we announced this week is we launched a new open source project called Amalgamate, amalgamate.io, which is our perspective on a microservices fabric and how do you actually build microservice applications out of a collection of images. I think it's important because, you know, microservices represent frankly a trade off, right? Like with microservices, everyone wants development velocity, right? That's what they're supposed to give you. But in exchange for that velocity, you get a much more complex operational environment. You get, instead of 12 monoliths running, you have 450 microservices each with three instances. You have 1500 things you're running, right? And so you need a framework and tools to help you kind of manage the complexity of that application. So microservice fabrics like amalgamate are an important part of making microservices real and usable. And the Bluemix update, where's that going? With all this energy with the application developers, what's next for Bluemix? What's the big work areas? Yeah, so Bluemix continues to evolve and bringing the kind of whole platform together, giving us that spectrum of capabilities, exposing APIs like Watson, you know, new things like WISC are coming along. So we have a serverless event-oriented programming also built on Docker, you know, one of the only serverless infrastructures that lets you use Docker packaging as the way you actually deliver your code into that environment. So it's really just kind of expanding the usability and the capabilities of Bluemix to handle this kind of amazing diversity of applications we're seeing. And your event is coming up. It's now called World of Watson, I believe. Yep. Put a little plug in for that. It's coming up in the fall. So any other updates? You know, we're just excited to be here and to have this amazing community behind us. We've been working hard to make containers kind of a core part of how people build apps. And I think Bluemix is a great platform for people to try it out. Final question for you. For the customers watching out there, and they ask you, help me understand the Docker madness. I can feel it, a lot of energy. Yeah. How do I figure this out? What does stuff fit? My head's mind blowing kind of experiences here. I'm hearing all this great stuff, all these use cases. Yeah, sure. What do I do? Right. Well, one I think Docker is like so popular because it's great for devs and great for ops people, right? It's, there's very few technologies that have been good for both. My recommendation on getting started is always the same. Pick one specific concrete problem or project and go use the technology on that project. People get so caught up in, oh, this is going to change my world and change my infrastructure. And it will eventually. But to get started, you just pick one thing, right? Pick one app and go build an app on Docker and you'll learn very quickly how to use it in your environment. Great. And the vibe of the show this year? Vive of the show is amazing. I mean, it's like double the size maybe of six months ago. So just incredible energy. A lot more ops this year, which is really interesting to see, like more of a blend of dev and ops people. So that's added in. What's the top conversation you've been involved in? If you had to do a little de-dupe your conversations and stack rank the top one, what's the top one? The top one is orchestration and microservices. Like there's such diversity of opinion. We saw lots of announcements from Docker this week, but lots of other ideas out there. Just immense conversation around like, what's the right approach for dealing with orchestration and dealing with microservices on top of containers? Jason McGee, fellow VP, IBM fellow, and also CTO of IBM cloud. Thanks for sharing your insights here on theCUBE. Good to see you again. I got the closing keynote starting in a few minutes. Thanks for swinging by theCUBE. This is theCUBE. Extracting the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, Brian Grace Lee. You're watching theCUBE.