 The Cube, at OpenStack Summit Atlanta 2014, is brought to you by Brocade. Say goodbye to the status quo, and hello to Brocade. And Red Hat. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. Okay, welcome back everyone, we're live in Atlanta for the OpenStack Summit. This is The Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events, I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, Stu Miniman and also at wikibond.org. And Stu, one of the things we love about The Cube is to go out to the events and get all the data we possibly can, and interview as many people as possible, stay out late at night to all the parties and talk to all the thought leaders, and it's great to have John Engage, the CTO of Rackspace back on The Cube, been involved on the technical side, in the industry, great to have you back and get your perspective. Thank you for having me. So OpenStack is really rockin' strong, the hype and the buzz and the activity is all there. Seeing it all play out, the Kool-Aid injections at the parties, people are pumped, it really is exciting. So I want to get your take on that, and obviously Rackspace, the genesis of the whole OpenStack movement really came from you guys, and you guys did collaborate very well with partners, and then got it off up and running, and really incubated and bootstrapped the whole thing, and made it all happen. So congratulations. But what's your take on it right now? What's the state of the OpenStack community right now? Well, honestly, I couldn't be more excited about OpenStack, the community, the conference that we're here at today. I think it's just really cool to see where we've come from and how far we've come in really just four years. The conference, I heard the numbers somewhere around 4,700 people here. I think Rackspace has almost 300 people. So we're here in force to represent our kind of angle on the OpenStack cloud. We're participating in a lot of sessions and speaking. I have a lot of speakers here. It's just great to see the community getting stronger every day. People actually, new vendors showing up every day. We see a lot of new faces down on the show floor down there, lots of new people bringing new solutions to the market. And that's really, that's great for all of us. It's really been fun and since I started SiliconANGLE, roughly in the middle of 2009, was the beginning. You guys, talking to Jim Curry and the folks down there, Brett and what not, we're really looking at the OpenStack, wasn't even on the table yet. It was really, you guys going to cloud, obviously big footprint as a company and you wanted to onboard developers and then Amazon was obviously established themselves very well at the time. You guys really, really set this up and we pointed out that Troy on the first day and Stu asked the question, kind of a loaded question, did Rackspace fumble the opportunity to get the leadership halo effect? We gave you guys props and I want to say it again to you because I think what you guys did was very bold. You basically stepped back for the betterment of the community. You really could have landed reps. Yeah. Well, look, we had to. I mean, people wouldn't, it wouldn't be as strong of a community today if we tried to smother it and hold onto it and keep it all for ourselves. I mean, that's not how you build a great community. That's how you, you know, that's a long shot if you try to go that route. You know, if you were in the keynote on Monday, you saw Troy Toman stand up and speak about OpenStack and the vision. It wasn't a sales pitch. It wasn't something that was kind of too commercial. It was really about laying out a vision for this community over the long term. And we've tried to do that all along. We've tried to be a good citizen within the community. We've tried to take our role of a big operator as part of our contribution, lots of code as well. But, you know, one of the unique things for us is that we run a massive OpenStack-based cloud and we have a lot to offer in terms of running it. I think, you know, being a good citizen is a big deal. Well, I want to make sure we continue to reiterate that because there's a lot of noise going on right now. We'll get that in a second. But you guys have done a great job and you guys have a lot of experience you've grown from. It's been good for the brand. It's been good for the business. Wall Street might not value it yet, but that's a whole another discussion. Well, they're getting hurt. That's the challenge. You know, they want instant results. You think about how long certain technologies have taken in the market. Virtualization didn't happen overnight. It's got a foothold in the enterprise, but it certainly didn't happen in one or two years, four years, whatever. It took 10 plus years. I mean, this is a multi-decade opportunity. I still think it's not even national anthem time at this point. You're seeing a start up to the ex-garner analyst now at Red Hat. And we both agree until you start to see those metrics out there where you're saying it's not about lines of code anymore. It's about market share and TAM and all these other business metrics. Then you have an industry. But right now you guys have been part of and now the community has really got a solid foundation. It looks like this will build a whole new industry. Yeah. I mean, it's the direction all of IT is going. It's not going to happen overnight. This is not a flavor of the month social network where all the users switch from one to the other. I mean, this is a major platform shift that's going on in a massive industry. And that stuff takes time. And I see it every day. More and more companies you saw here at the conference very big name companies making big bets on OpenStack. And they're not doing that for fun. They're doing it because they see a vision down the road of real use of that platform or that technology at enterprise scale across their entire business. All new applications are being built in an agile way and they need OpenStack to be the foundation for that kind of shift. All right. So John, you told me there's almost 300 rackers here at the show. I'm wondering if you could help explain to the audience out there. You know, there's so many projects out there. You know, where do you see kind of the maturity of the various projects and, you know, where are the rackers spending their time, you know, helping to mature and helping to build different pieces. Yeah. Well, look, I think there are a number of projects. You're right. That's sometimes actually a little overwhelming for a new user or a new customer of OpenStack. But the kind of foundational products are, you know, Nova for compute, Swift. You know, those are the oldest and the original and the ones that almost everybody knows and certainly the ones that are sort of the foundation of OpenStack. There's a lot of new projects, though, emerging. I mean, we have a team here that's very excited about a project called Trove, which is database as a service. We have a team that's working hard on a project called Heat, which is the orchestration, making sure you can deploy applications easily into OpenStack Clouds. We have guys working on guys and girls, I should say. I mean, there's a lot of female rackers here, too. We had Nicky, you're in Vandalista on this week. I use the word guys, you know, sort of generically, but, you know, there's a cross-section here. You know, the different projects that are emerging are all very exciting. Sometimes, you know, with a project like OpenStack and a company like Rackspace, you really can't dictate to developers what to work on. They're going to gravitate to the things that they get excited about, and whatever they're involved in has to be sort of their passion, because this is open source. It's a labor of love. And I think, you know, we see our developers really go in a lot of different directions, but mostly further up the stack. I mean, there's a lot of the foundational stuff that's pretty well baked at this point. And yes, we've got to continue to help scale it and make it more efficient and make it more solid and upgradable and those kinds of things, but the fun stuff for a lot of the developers tends to be things like, you know, integration with a container technology like Docker or, you know, work on, like I mentioned, maybe big data as a service, you know, something like that. So, yeah. So, talk about some of the trends you're seeing. Obviously, you know, we were talking about, you know, the buzz on the hallways. You mentioned Docker and the containers. Obviously, as an undercurrent, certainly in the show, may not be on the top billing in terms of, you know, themes. Certainly, it's been got a lot of action on the crowd chat. What are you seeing at this show that's in the hallways? The conversations in the hallways? Well, look, I think that there's constant debates about every...I'm trying to pick out one thing that sort of stands out. I mean, you know, heat has come up a lot. I mean, every racker I talk to is talking about that. There was a container event down the hall that was standing room only. People couldn't even get in. The bare metal, you know, as a service, being able to roll out bare metal servers with Ironic is kind of a next wave, I think, for clouds. People want to go and really get the best performance out of it. You know, lots of interest in applications on top, you know, that I mentioned database, big data. Just really, you know, further up the stack and getting into the application space. A lot of developers here. This is basically a DevOps show. We were commenting yesterday on our summary. I mean, it's not billed as a DevOps show, this is DevOps guys, right? What's your take on DevOps? You guys are a DevOps company, certainly with your efforts and your work, what you've learned and what you've overcome and built. You have servicing customers. But not all customers actually want to be DevOps. They want maybe called CloudOps. But it can DevOps translate. I mean, certainly it will as a matter of architecture and principle. It's a concept and a revolution. But what has to happen to make the ninjas of DevOps you know, that called the top 1% of developers which I would classify as DevOps. They're really kicking ass. To what I call mainstream developers where the automations there, you mentioned heat, that's orchestration. These are the things that are being worked on. What's a take for an enterprise to have the best of DevOps without all the work? Well, I think, you know, for us we as a company have been using DevOps kind of strategies for deploying our cloud and scaling our application stacks and making sure that we're, you know, using all the latest best practices in terms of, you know, building modern software, agile, you know, that sort of methodology. But, you know, enterprises they want to go fast, too. They want to build things like the startups do. They want to bring in some of that innovative spirit. They want to attract the same kinds of developers that the startups can grab and they want to bring them into their shop. And so I think that's what's driving a lot of the interest in OpenStack. It gives you a solid foundation for you to do the kind of automation that DevOps is really all about. Making sure you can automate the deployment of applications, the scale out and scale back of applications, making sure that you're building a very templatized way of deploying. You know, Rackspace is taking it one step further, not only giving customers that foundation, but also the services to go with it. We've been a company for a long time in a industry that was about what we call fanatical support, which is services and expertise and helping customers make transitions as technology shifts. Well, we're doing that yet again with DevOps. DevOps is sort of our next flavor of fanatical support. It's the way we're going to help companies adopt the technologies they want to do, whether it's Chef or Ansible. We're using both of those technologies in our DevOps Automation Service. We have lots of other open-source tools that we're trying to bring together. What we find is that companies have a hard time having all of that expertise on one small team, and oftentimes it is a small team. Even with an enterprise, the innovative developer team is sometimes a handful of people, and they want to adopt these same sort of methodologies, and so we're really bringing that to them as a capability that we can help accelerate that whole adoption process. What does it take to attract, you know, train and keep those type of people? It seems a critical thing at this show. Everybody is hiring and getting a dancing unicorn is tough. Not only manage all the infrastructure, but also code. Rackspace has been doing this a long time. How do you guys do it? What advice are you given to enterprises? Well, look, I think for us, we've always thought about the infrastructure, the environment that these we call them rackers. Where do they have to come to work every day? Who do they have to work with? What kind of conditions do they work under? All of those things matter, and when you're competing for good talent, you really have to set a good stage for them to do their best work. I mean, these people are very creative. They have, you know, different work styles. They like to work in different, you know, kind of a different hour sometimes of the constraints because that kind of stifles the whole creativity of being a developer. It is a very creative process and you have to get into the zone and you have to do a lot of things that, you know, typical business guys just don't understand. So we've tried very hard to build a great culture for engineers and developers to do their best work. We let them choose a lot of their own tools that really matters. It would be like telling an artist you have to use this particular type of paint brush. It's going to use the tools that make for a great outcome. And I think having a little bit of flexibility rather than being so strict and so prescriptive and so, you know, kind of stiff in the way that you do IT, which is how, you know, for many years it was all about control, control, control, locking things down and keeping, you know, shadow IT at bay. And I think you kind of need to let things go a little bit and let people go have a little faith in people that they can make the right decisions. Put a few guardrails around it, but give them tools that they want to use, the technologies that they like, let them be creative. Okay, speaking of tools, you know, you mentioned HEAT is one of the projects that are out there. You know, when I think about Rackspace and a lot of the service providers out there, it's how we manage the entire system that often is what's differentiating them. Can you talk to, you know, what have you guys seen from an evolutionary standpoint as to how you operationalize your environment, you know, and I know you've helped, you know, many customers, you know, adopt from a private cloud environment the Rackspace operational model. So can you walk us through what that journey's been the last couple of years, what's changed and where's it gone? Yeah, well, in the early days of Rackspace, you know, we did a lot of things by hand. IT was a, you know, it was something that, you know, was done like a craftsman. You put a server in the rack, and you pay close attention to that server. You know, they use this analogy of pets versus cattle. We had a lot of pets back in those days. You know, nowadays when we deploy, we deploy a fleet of servers. We deploy racks of servers that are already preconfigured, pre-cabled, pre-racked. We roll them into the data center at large scale. We don't do anything a server at a time anymore. And so when you do that, it gives you opportunities for a lot more automation. You can write one script that will populate all those servers with the right hypervisor and the right image and the right operating system and the right IP address space and then go back and look at the database and now you've got all of this, you know, capacity that you can go use as part of your cloud. That has fundamentally changed the way we do things in the data center and then what that enables is all of your engineers and developers and architects to go do the same thing up in the software tier. Build software is now much more automated in terms of the testing and the deployment process. We talked about DevOps a minute ago and that's really at the heart of it. It's sort of automating the entire pipeline of going from an idea to something deployed in production and then if something goes wrong, you roll right back because you've got the blueprints, you've got the checkpoints along the way. So that's changed a lot for us. John, you wrote a blog post leading up to the show here talking about some of those public cloud providers and what many have called the race to zero. Yep. Can you share with us, you know, has your thinking changed at all from what you're hearing at the show? You know, how do you differentiate going forward? It's actually reinforced for me that what I wrote in the blog post is really very true. People look out there at the market and say, you know, there's big cloud guys dropping prices. I mean, that literally is the lever that they're using to try to compete with one another. When you're using that lever, you're truly trying to tell the world that it's a commodity. You know, it's trying to make an apples-to-apples comparison with your product and somebody else's and just, you know, if you have that scale to be able to do that, that's fine, but it isn't really a differentiating dimension. It's just one cent lower. I think the opportunity for companies to play their game and play their game, that's what we're doing. Just to poke at that a little bit, I think that Amazon's got Redshift that they're growing. Google has their application engine that they're doing a lot on top of it, so the public cloud guys are building services. We talked about here at OpenStack, you're building databases as a service. Everybody's trying to move up the stack, so in many ways the infrastructure layer may be commoditized in many ways, but it's the services on top that I'm getting at as well. We're doing it maybe in a slightly different way than building a Redshift or building something like App Engine, but our customers are telling us they want services on top as well. They come in the form of something like DevOps Automation Service or our MongoDB service that we call Object Rocket, which is a very scalable, very cool platform for MongoDB developers to just take advantage of something that's very turnkey and simple, scales very well. We're doing services that we're going after as well. We know that commodity infrastructure isn't going to be something you can differentiate on, but we also know that customers aren't quite as price sensitive as people would have you believe, because we used an analogy in that blog post. It's like comparing apples and apple pie. One's an input and one's an outcome, right? And people, they want an outcome. Sometimes people will pay for a better outcome. When it's Super Bowl Sunday and your brand is on the line, are you worried about saving two cents or are you worried about paying up for the right service level that's going to guarantee a great outcome? You have everything on the line, right? And that's, for a lot of customers, that's worth the difference. And that's where we're headed. John, talk about what you guys are doing right now on the business side. That's from the technical perspective of the CTO. I mean, obviously you have a huge business, but you know, putting the Wall Street, not understanding cloud aside, we don't want to go there. We could later, but I want to just get into a little bit more detail here. But also, we mentioned earlier, you've been involved in building OpenStack and done all that greatness. How are you guys selling to customers today and how does that relate to what's going on in the OpenStack community? So just tie that together, connect the dots of the work you're doing in OpenStack and how that translates into the business value for you guys. Sure. Well, OpenStack is a foundation for a few products that we offer. Private Cloud is a very popular platform that Troy mentioned on stage that we've deployed over 100 enterprise private clouds across both Rackspace data centers and Customer Premises data centers. We also think about public cloud. You know, that's a huge platform for us as well. It sits very nicely next to a private cloud. A lot of people are talking about hybrid clouds as being sort of the way forward. So we look at hybrid cloud as bringing together disparate technologies, whether it be traditional bare metal servers, VMware servers, private cloud, public cloud, bringing that all together in a seamless underlying platform. We did a demo yesterday on a technology that we created that we call RackConnect, which is the networking technology that orchestrates all of that and makes it feel like one seamless set of resources. And then again, on top of all that, we want to bring a service level and an experience that customers can rely on to make sure they're choosing the right platform, that they're doing the right things to make sure they have great outcomes and great success in the cloud, getting the help they need on the platforms that their developers want to use, like MongoDB or Hadoop. We rolled out a product recently that uses another set of OpenStack technologies with our Hadoop service. We were partnered with Hortonworks on that, but those are the kinds of applications customers want to use. They want help. They want guidance, and they want a great hybrid cloud platform. So give me an example of an enterprise. I want some of that cloud stuff. I see what Amazon is doing. Probably got some shadow IT and a bunch of other APIs that they don't even know about. Or maybe they have shadow cloud. We were talking about that yesterday. There's a new concept called shadow cloud. There's a shadow cloud going on. Not shadow IT, old cloud. But okay, I'm an on-prem enterprise. I want to move to the hybrid cloud. I see that as a really nice bridge to a fully integrated continuum of computing. What do I do? Do I dial up a... The answer is the phone, which is a beautiful thing. Just try to call one of our competitors and see if somebody actually picks up the phone. We always do. We don't even have a system they answer the phone for. We always pick up the phone. So the point is, you talk to a racker. A racker will help you understand. They'll try to figure out what you have today. We have a team that does advisory services, transformation services, enterprises need help going from where they are to where they'd like to be. Sometimes that means something we would do but you want to talk to that customer. I want to talk to the customer. You're saying Rackspace can deliver value to me as an enterprise customer. It's all about figuring out the needs of that enterprise. If it's a rapid time-to-market thing, it might be a combination of the public cloud plus something in their own data center. If it's about getting out of the data center business and picking up some workloads, we might move some of their VMware infrastructure over and put that next to a public cloud so they can be agile. Talk about the customer. One of the things Stu and I have been looking at and this is, I guess, the state of the industry. It's not a lot of customer pimping going on. You see some customers on stage, Disney and Wells Fargo which are awesome to share their stories. There's a lot of folks who aren't sharing because they're either confidential or not ready to talk about it publicly. So share your perspective on that. Why are they doing that? And two, what is the customer environment look like right now? Still POCs? Are they moving to production? The bigger companies, the bigger brand name companies tends to be with a team that's doing the real innovative stuff and sometimes that feels to the enterprise like that's the secret sauce. I don't want that team to go leak out everything that they're doing to tell sort of signal to the world what we're building. I remember a couple of sessions or summits ago, Comcast came out and demoed their new set top box and I'm sure they showed it on top of the OpenStack platform and they don't want to tell all their competitors way ahead of time. I believe it is to some extent. We're hearing from compliance issues too. They don't necessarily know what this looks like yet so they don't know how to govern it or comply with. For instance, like you mentioned big data, big data creates big privacy issues, big security issues. If done wrong, yes. It's a whole new ball game, right? This new technology, sometimes if you look at a very highly regulated industry they've got years and years of audit standards and practices that they use and sometimes the new technologies throws those things for a loop. You have to now audit in a very different kind of a way across a hybrid cloud, across different locations and different clouds. You don't see customers tentative at this point. No, people are ready to go. Cloud is no longer a if, it's just a win for companies. I got switched to the OpenStack piece. You've been there from the beginning, you know, flower out now and then the fruit's coming off the tree. There's some low-hanging fruit. I want to talk to you about what you're concerned about and what you're optimistic about. What are you worried about? Obviously, you mentioned earlier, you can't control what developers work on, especially when it's happening in the open. It just happens in its own folks' autonomy if you will and how they behave. So that's one thing. You really can't control it. What do you worry about in the community if you don't get worried? I don't worry too much about specific projects. I think those things work themselves out when you've got a good community community sorts that out. I think the perceptions are the things I worry about the most are misperceptions. People looking in from outside I've heard it a number of times where they say, look, nobody's making any money on OpenStack. Well, look, nobody made a lot of money on Linux in the early days either, but Linux is a part of everything we do and now you wouldn't think twice that you're going to make money. It's not going to be necessarily a free lunch for anybody. You've got to do some work. You've got to go add some value added in terms of software that you write. You've got to add it in terms of capabilities that you bring to the table, expertise, something. It's not as if you can take free software off the shelf and turn it into gold without doing some bit of work. But there are people making money with OpenStack. There are companies out on the floor making money with OpenStack, so I think that's a misperception. Surely there will be some companies that don't make it. Surely a little company that just gets in, try to ride the hype wave and doesn't do much is not going to make it. But very many will and there's some out there that There's a lot of fun to get pumped about, too. There's a lot of people that are in their business on OpenStack. It was a real threat and they'd love to sow the seeds of doubt and uncertainty about the project. It's a vibrant community. 4,700 people here. Every year it grows. There is no doubt that OpenStack is a sure thing in the long term. We make it our business to look for cracks in the foundation and we have seen some cracks in the past, certainly when it became more of a land grab market and you guys kind of step back and say, hey, you know what, let's set a shift of the tide to where the community came back and said this is too important. I just don't see any cracks in the foundation at this point. I mean, to write that news, I'm going to dig into it. But if it starts to go into silos, then it's going to be a whole community uproar, in my opinion. So we're going to watch that. Scaleout should not be silo based. It shouldn't be horizontally scalable. Do you agree? I agree. Okay, so what's the most exciting thing that you saw on the show? Scaleout. Oh, man, that's a great question. You know, the hard part for me is I don't get to spend as much time at the show as I'd like. I spend time with guys like you. I spend time out here in the hallways. But look, the buzz is the most exciting thing. The work that's going on in these sessions, these design sessions back here behind us are the most exciting things. The developers getting together and geeking out on the technologies to get them excited to me, that's it. There's no one thing that I can pick out. But it really is it's just the success of the community. My final question for you. I want you to tell the folks in your own words. I mean, Dave Vellante and I still always talk about. We'd love to analyze. We'd also, you know, living in Silicon Valley on my end. We'd love to talk about inflection points and comparing and contrasting this to other things. I want you to share with the folks in your own words. Why is this point in time in the technology history and business so compelling, so radically different than anything before? It doesn't seem to be one major trend. It seems to be a confluence of many things kind of coming together. Those tectonic plates are shifting. Well, yeah, it's the big drivers of cloud. Yeah, no, it's certainly it's, you know, mobile is a huge driver of this mobile is at the center of everything we do. I walk around with two or three mobile devices. What am I consuming on that mobile? Probably a software as a service application, probably some big data in that feed somewhere, a social network or two, you know, lots of data coming and going, getting stored somewhere, getting analyzed somewhere. That is the cloud. A lot of people try to put their finger on what cloud is and it's really just the architecture for how we're going to do computing from now on. I mean, there's a team that's trying to reinvent a company that Rackspace acquired called ZeroVM trying to reinvent the platform for the next wave of cloud computing. People are going to keep iterating and keep inventing technology to make it faster, better, cheaper, and easier for developers to build that next wave of technology. And that's what gets me excited. We're reinventing IT right here. I mean, IT used to be this thing that was behind a data center wall, behind closed doors in a different department. Now it is the business. It is the business. I mean, software is the business for so many companies and if it's not software, it's hardware that's connected to the cloud or something like that. So I think that's just And developers are at the center of the opportunity. I mean, it's one of the best times to be a developer. Oh, man. It's just like, pick your territory. I mean, you've got mobile, you've got data science. I mean, so much stuff to go on. Absolutely. They're in high demand. Developers are, there's a book called The New Kingmakers, and developers are absolutely the new kingmakers because they're the guys in the driver's seat. They're the people that are inventing the future and that's what that's what's going to get us there. John and Gay, CTO of Rackspace. Great to see you again. And then we're here at the OpenStack Summit. You guys, big part of it. Appreciate all the support and congratulations. It's been a great journey to watch you guys and continue to have the success. This is theCUBE. We've been documenting. We've been there from day one, but this is our second year live broadcast because it's mainstream. People are pumped. We have yet to see any cracks in the foundation and certainly we see them. We'll report them, but a lot great news here at OpenStack. John, thanks for joining us. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.