 From Austin, Texas, it's the Cube. Covering DockerCon 2017, brought to you by Docker and support from its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman here with Jim Kobielus. Happy to welcome back to the program. Someone we've had on theCUBE many times, Ben Golov, who's the CEO of Docker. Welcome back, and congratulations to you and the team. Oh, hey, thank you. Now, this is, I'd like to say, this is our favorite time of year. Followed very closely by the week after DockerCon when we go longer after it. Absolutely. I mean, look, I said the word that stuck out for me the most this morning is scalability. So, we talk about how customers are thinking about scalability, how you scale the different solutions you have, and look at the scale of an event like this. So, we've got this big event here, 5,500 people, as you said, which we were reminiscing back to the first DockerCon and the growth of this. It's impressive, and it's gone really well. I haven't seen people griping about taking an hour to check in. Food's been good, you know, line happened. So, and Austin, you know, always a fun place to come. Absolutely. Apropos for all the open source stuff that's going on. Yeah, the only problem is this is the first place where we've had a Docker conference where we haven't been at a port. So, like all of these great, you know, look at the container ships outside, you know, we can no longer do that. Yeah, Vancouver maybe would be good. I remember, I actually, I did puns for an entire week when we were at OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, you know, overlooking the bay there, because there's container ships everywhere. That's right, that's right. So, Ben, you know, please just bring us up to speed. Kind of you, the team, we've gone through a lot of the announcements, but, you know, some of the highlights for you. Yeah, I mean, obviously this morning we had a lot of fantastic announcements. We talked about Linux Kit, we talked about Moby, you saw just huge improvements to the developer flow. Tomorrow's going to be a lot about Enterprise. And for me, that's really the most exciting change that we've seen over the past year, is just an explosion of Docker in the Enterprise. Docker's brought in over 400 Enterprise-class customers, some of the largest names, really in the industry, right? And some of them like MetLife and Visa and Intuit, we'll be talking live tomorrow. And what's been especially interesting for us is that their usage of Docker is not just for Greenfield projects. Docker's being used to keep planes in the air, keep trains running on time, it's being used from the largest financial transactions, handling millions of millions of transactions a day, right? And that's really exciting for us, it's also very humbling. Yeah, all those use cases throughout, it's Docker covers lots of applications from a variety of things. Right, right, and a lot of them are, you know, they're 15, 30 year old applications as well as, you know, two minute old applications. Yeah, and it's something we've been picking at, is how much is it the new stuff and how much is it the platform that can bring some of the older stuff in and then we look at how we change it over time. And that's, I think, something we've been struggling with, kind of, whole cloud and app, you know, modernization for years now. Yeah, well, I think it's really good, because I think there's sort of this fallacy that sort of persisted for a while where people thought, okay, you know, you're going to have bimodal IT, there's going to be the cool new stuff done in containers, running the cloud, and then all of that old stuff that's just going to wither and die in some dark data center somewhere. Yeah, it doesn't match what we hear. That's absolutely not the case. Actually, you know, if we look across our customer base, you know, about 50% of them are beginning their Docker journey with their traditional apps. Now that's not where it ends, but you know, if you think about it, just by taking, you know, 80% or 90% of the apps out there are traditional applications running on traditional infrastructure. And just by taking a traditional application, you put it inside of a Docker container, you know, automatically you're getting, without changing a single line of code, something between 75% and 5x better resource utilization, you're able to do simple things like upgrade your database or move from an old machine to a new machine or old data center to a new data center, again, without changing a single line of code. But then the magic starts, right? Then you start taking that traditional application and treating it in a more modern way. CICD, gradually breaking it down into smaller and smaller bits, and that's where the journey goes. You know, some of us struggle, we said, you know, remember back virtualization. Virtualization has the easy low hanging fruit of, oh, I can consolidate, I can get ready utilization, I could save a lot of money. I think you did a good job laying out, you know, in your last statement there, but it's not as simple, you know, when it gets bubbled up to the customers, you know, the board, the sea level, when they're doing this, what is it they're like, what's the initiative they're running? Because it's not, you know, nobody says, oh, I have a container problem. Or I need to fix it. What is that, you know, business need, you know, that you're helping to help them sit at itch? At some level, they need to be more efficient, they need to be faster, right? And Docker helps you do that if you're running brand-spanning new applications. That's what we've been talking about for quality. But, you know what, part of agility is also making sure that your existing applications don't weigh you down, right? And that they actually support your business strategy going forward. Yeah, and I mean, one of the things that excited me about containers in the early days is, I'm an infrastructure guy, and infrastructure's always held us back. And the atomic, you know, containers bring the application really as the atomic node. It's not the server or the VM, it's the app. Or, you know, the, you know, 12 factor, you know, app there, so it's the app's driving it, not in infrastructure matters, but it's not the thing driving it. Right, well, by focusing on the app, we actually let people choose the infrastructure that they want, or migrate from one style of infrastructure to another style over time. What it also though means is if you're focusing on the app or on the container, then how you think about security, and how you think about networking, and how you think about compliance, you know, all of those things need a refresh, but the good news is once you do that refresh, it's actually much faster, much more efficient. All right, so you know John Furrier wouldn't let this interview come without, you know, popping in, so he's just sending me a note. He says, what is the intersection between the cloud native and the app developers that you're seeing? The internet intersection between the cloud native, Cloud native and app developers. You know, I think that developers want to build cool stuff. And if they build a cloud native, that's fantastic. If they want to build it not being cloud native, that's very cool too, right? We're seeing this whole generation of developers who may have been working in Java for the past 15 years, or working in .NET, and they're able to do really, really cool things with Docker, and it actually helps bring them into the cloud native space. But you don't have to rewrite an amazing application, just because your infrastructure is changing. Yeah, you can wrap in a refactor, migrate your existing applications at the pace that you wish, rather than being forcibly upgraded or migrated. That's right, that's right. And you also don't need to know what cloud you're going to be running on for years from now, or what infrastructure you're going to be running on, or what your app's going to be able to do, right? You know, this stuff happens organically with Docker, and that's really part of the beauty of it. Because you know you're developing a multi-cloud, in other words, the clouds you're on today and the clouds you might be on tomorrow, and a flexible or graceful transition. You know, it's really cloud churn. Over time, you're going to be on a variety of clouds, and you just want to make sure your applications and your data and all your assets are easily migratable. Yeah, I think you stated that really well, and I think especially as people start looking into applications where they want to burst, or applications that are sort of big data where they want to be moving the application to the data rather than the data to the applications, right? It needs to be multi-cloud, because actually, multi-location, right? And we're happy to help that. Yeah, so we've watched maturity of the technology, the growth of the ecosystem. I mean, I think a lot of us were really happy. Ecosystem, I mean, you know, Solomon did a great job of highlighting that. To be honest, you know, some of the swarm stuff with Docker Data Center last year, felt like it- Felt like we're fighting, yeah. It felt a little bit of fighting, and it feels like we're healing, we're coming together and we're growing that. So, yeah, I mean, maybe speak on that a little bit, but the follow-up question I have for you on kind of the business is, I think we're still pretty early in the monetization strategy for this, and I think it's good for people to realize that, that all of this stuff doesn't happen overnight. It's amazing to see how far it's come in, just four years of a company, but I'll let you riff on those two things. Yeah, yeah, I mean, so I'll start with the first one, which is fighting within the ecosystem, or there's sort of this saying that, people hate people of a slightly different sect more than they hate pagans, right? And so I think sometimes within the open source community, it's like, oh, you take a slightly different approach towards orchestration than I would have taken, therefore, we should be enemies, and then at some point you step back and say, no, wait a minute, we're all trying to do the same thing, build great apps and make the world, enable people to build great things, right? And as I think Solomon laid out today, right? Orchestration, container runtime, security, networking, various flavors of security, these are all things that actually should be really atomic, and we should be able to collaborate on them, and so you're seeing a lot more of that. Because also what we're seeing is in terms of monetization, monetization isn't driven by a single factor, it's not driven by orchestration, or it's not driven by networking, it's really, what we're seeing more and more is it's being driven by the supply chain, and it's how do I, as an enterprise, with lots of developers building lots of different types of apps, some are old, some are new, some are Linux, some are Windows, some are running on-prem, some are running in the cloud, how do I manage that supply chain and have it be secure no matter where it's going? And that's where we're able to add a lot of value, and what we're finding as a business to get to your point is that we'll meet the customer wherever they want to start. Our business model, the subscription model, we charge based off of nodes per year or nodes per minute if you really want to go there, and we just let them gradually start using more and more and more, and so we're actually very excited, not only do we have 400 large customers and 10,000 smaller customers, but we're seeing that every customer is expanding, is renewing, and so customers who were on 40 nodes six months ago are now on 400, 500, 1,000 nodes, we have one 12,000 node customer, and that's really good for our business model. Yeah, the other question from Furrier is, what KPIs are you tracking this year? You talk 400 enterprise customers, you look at the size of how many employees you have, what are some of the growth drivers and levers that you guys are playing with this year? Yeah, it's honestly for us, the most important metrics that we're looking at is, obviously, number of new users, how that's friendly, the number of new customers, and within the customers, how many nodes are they deploying on, and most importantly, how many more of them? Is that growing too? That's growing too, right? So density of containers per host is growing, and for us though, the KPI is okay, how are those customers doing, how many of them are renewing, how many of them are expanding, and for us, I think that brings it back to the customer level. If we do a good job with the customers, especially the subscription business model, that sort of forces you to, if you invest in the customer, then they're going to invest in you. Yeah, speaking of money, we've got Sherry Chen coming on next, and Furrier's saying there's a lot of top VCs here. What do you see, what's driving investment in this area? Where are you guys with dollars, anything you can say on that? It's just kind of the VC investment. If Furrier wants to ask difficult questions, he's got to be sitting here, otherwise, yes. No, I mean, so we're seeing... John is shy, he can only talk through intermediaries. Yeah, I understand, John is not shy. Talk to yourself, John. You know, we're very happy about what's happening with our monetization, and we're seeing the top line growing much, much faster than the expense line growing. Obviously we want them to cross, right, at a certain point, it looks like that's going to happen pretty soon here. But I think there's so much interest in this area, because this really is much broader than a single application, right? I mean, yeah, you can go out and you can invest in some great SaaS companies, or some great open source application companies, but containerization and dockerization, it's really a sea change, and it's impacting infrastructure, it's impacting apps, it's impacting networking and storage in all sort of the traditional areas, but I think in a really exciting way. Can you speak to the culture of Docker? And I remember that first show in 2014, 42 employees. And now you've got a little over 300. Yeah, yeah. What is the prototypical, what do you look for in a Docker employee there? What do you see this company being when you're a thousand employees? That's a really good question. How do you motivate them? What is the vision that they're all? Well, something like this, this is incredibly motivating. And honestly, for people at Docker, and we look for all different types, I sort of say, hey, we kind of like people who are type A personalities and type B bodies, you know, we're really excited, but are able to run at sprint pace for a marathon. But honestly, the things that keep us really, really motivated is, I always say like, if you're ever feeling down at Docker, go talk to users, go talk to customers, and that will get you excited. You know, I spoke this morning about TGen, which is this non-profit genomics company, and the fact that Docker has enabled them to sequence individual patients' genomes so much faster and diagnose them and pair them faster in that you've heard the story of the young girl who spent the first 12 years of her life in a wheelchair, barely able to talk, and now because of the things that Docker helped enable, she's out, she's living life like a typical teenager, you know, wants to become a genomic scientist when she grows up, going to mainstream school. I mean, that's motivating. And that helps deal with the normal trough of, okay, the code didn't work, we missed the ship date, whatever the case may be. Yeah, yeah, you didn't help advertising clicks, you know, you're helping to improve lives. Yeah, it is. And do that, and you know, I love that the show here, you've got some charitable events that you're contributing to. Yeah. It's, are there activities you guys are doing at corporate to help drive kind of civic engagement? You know, we do, but what we found is the best is when it comes from, you know, from inside our employee base. And of course, you know, our employee base, they really love nothing more than going out and talking to users. And to some extent, so you know, we do have a lot of charitable things we do, it's really exciting to have, you know, 14 and 13 year olds who are using your technology. I mean, whoever thought, I spent my entire life trying to have something that my kids would think is cool, and actually now they think Docker is, right? How does it tie in with the education? Are you guys helping to, you know, the next generation of Aptev people? Absolutely, Docker is actually being used very broadly in computer science courses just because, you know, that's basically how teachers want students to submit their projects, right? They submit it in a Docker container, right? And of course, we're thrilled that they're learning how to use Docker. It also means that they don't need to worry about making sure the students' laptops are set up correctly. They can focus on writing great code. But yes, we engage in education. We're doing some educational work with people in San Francisco just because that's our home base. And we're really happy to support, you know, three, actually four wonderful charities that are here at DockerCon today, you know, some servicing LGBT youth. We've got one in the genomic space, one focused on teaching coding, and that just kind of, that really helps stay motivated. Ben, it's a shame you're not having any fun. You know, I'm having a ton of fun. I'm exhausted. I'll probably collapse in a corner, you know, come Friday. As you said, your second favorite week of the year is next week, right? Absolutely, absolutely. All right, Ben, want to give you the final word. You know, we've got another day. I'm sure you've got a ton of stuff in the announcement tomorrow. We're going to have Solomon on right after the keynote tomorrow. But when people leave Austin, what do you want them to know about, you know, the Docker community and Docker the company? You know, I'd say that, you know, Docker is here, Docker is now, Docker is for old and for new, for on-premise and for cloud, for Linux and for Windows. Docker is here for you, and however you want to use us, we're going to help you do amazing things faster. All right, I think that's a wonderful Cube gem to end us on. Ben Gallop, CEO of Docker. Always a pleasure to talk with you. Congratulations on the show. We are thrilled to be able to be here to cover it. And we'll be back with one more guest here on our day one of two days of live coverage. You're watching theCUBE.