 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Summit 2017. Brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation, Red Hat, an additional ecosystem of support. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host, John Troyer. Happy to welcome back to the program. It's been a couple of years, but Mark Baker, who is the Ubuntu product manager for OpenStack at Canonical, thanks so much for joining us. Oh, you're welcome, it's a pleasure to be back on. All right, so you said you've been coming to these shows for over six years now. You sit on the OpenStack Foundation. We've been talking this week. There's all that, you know, buzz and misinformation and, you know, God, what does Snowden say this morning? It's like fear is one of the most powerful weapons out there, you know, sometimes there's just misinformation out there, but for you, you know, OpenStack today, where you see it in general and in your role with Canonical. Sure, so OpenStack is one of the cornerstones of our business and it's certainly a big revenue generator for us. We continue to grow customers in that space and that mirrors what we see in the OpenStack community. So all of the numbers you will have seen in the OpenStack survey show that adoption continues to grow. And sure, there is, I don't know if I want to call it fake news out there, but there's definitely memes going that, okay, OpenStack is perhaps declining in popularity. That's not what we see in adoption. We see adoption continuing to grow, more customers coming onto the platform, more revenues coming from those customers. Yeah, Mark, any data you can share? We did have, we had Heidi Joy on from the foundation to talk about the survey. I mean, big, you know, adoption over 74% of deployments are outside of the US. We talked to Mark and John up in this morning. They said, well, that's where more than 74% of the population of the world lives outside of the US. Any trends or data points specifically about a bunch of customers too? Sure, so we definitely have big customers outside of the US. You look at perhaps one of our best well-known is Deutsche Telecom, obviously a global telco that's situated in Europe that's deploying OpenStack really at the core of their network. That's going into multiple countries and we see not only more customers, but also those existing customers growing their estate. We've got other engagements as well in the Nordics with Tele2 and other telco that has a larger state too and increasingly out in Asia too. So we definitely see this as being a global trend towards adoption. All right, and Mark, there was, you know, for years, it was okay, how many distributions are there out there? How many do we need out there? Why do customers turn to Ubuntu when they want OpenStack? So the challenge of operating infrastructure at scale is not can I deploy it. It's not so much even, you know, how performant is it? It's really kind of boils down to economics and a large part of that economics is how are you able to operate that cloud efficiently? And we've proven time and time again that a lot of the work that we've put in since the very beginning around tooling and around operations is what allows people to stand up these clouds, operate them at scale, upgrade them, apply patches, do all of those things but operate them efficiently at scale without having to scale the number of staff they require to operate that cloud. Yeah, I think back to the staff that's been around for at least 15 years is companies spend 70 or 80% or even more of their budget on keeping the lights on, you know, running around the data center, doing that. Anything you could tell us about, you know, OpenStack and how that shifts those economics for the data center? Sure, so OpenStack has gone through a typical sort of evolution that many technologies go through and if you're liking it to Linux, obviously we are a Linux company. In the beginning with Linux, many people would build their own distributions, they'd compile their own kernels, they'd make modifications and a lot of the big lighthouse users of OpenStack went through that process. We are seeing the adoption changing now and so people are coming to companies like us with an OpenStack distribution that's off the shelf ready and packaged with reference architectures, proven methodologies for implementing this successfully and consuming it much more like that. Without that package, this free software can actually be very expensive to operate and so you have to get, getting those economics right comes from having those packages for people to be able to deploy, manage it and scale it efficiently on site. So you've been involved with OpenStack throughout the whole evolution. Is there anything you see now in 2017 at this summit? This is my first summit. I'm very impressed. As an outsider, again, we started off talking about what you hear from the outside, talking to people here at the show, people standing up their very first clouds this year. Very bullish, very kind of conscious of, okay, this is not a winner take all world, there's a place for OpenStack that's actually very kind of clear and very well fit. Do you see a difference in the customers that you're working with now in 2017, their maturity level, their expectations? Then perhaps you did a few years ago. So yes, certainly customers have complex and diverse requirements. And so they want to deliver different styles of applications in different ways. And OpenStack is a great way of delivering machines, whether it's virtual machines or container machines to applications and provides a very robust and agile environment for doing that. But other styles of application may require to run natively on bare metal. OpenStack can do some of that and do a lot of that. But we're certainly seeing customers understanding, okay, OpenStack has a role, Public Cloud has a role, Container Technologies have a role, a lot of these intersect together. And really our objective is to help them whether they're choosing container platforms and OpenStack, whether they're using Public Cloud to ensure that they're able to manage this in an official way to deliver value to their business. You talked about operability. We talked with Mark Shuttleworth. He was also, we were remarking that Ubuntu, the operating system is by far the majority choice in OpenStack and in a lot of cloud projects. Can you talk a little bit more about operability? Again, the traditional dig from outside the project a few years ago, science project hard to use, need to have computer scientists to even get it running, which as a former Linux person myself, I find that a little bit insulting. It's not that, you know, it's rocket science but it's not that complicated. So NASA guys, we're involved at the beginning. That is true. But can you talk a little bit about operability in terms of, again, what you're seeing in terms of either private cloud or people standing up, the operations team needed, the maintainability day two operations, that sort of thing in a modern OpenStack environment? Yeah, so OpenStack is becoming, certainly in a lot of the enterprise customers that we're working with now, it's becoming another platform that will sit alongside the VMware. There may be some intersection of that. Our goal is to have common operations. So if I want to deploy applications into containers, I could do that into Kubernetes. I'm just running on VMware. I could do that on OpenStack. I could do it in public cloud to have common tooling and common operations across as much of the status we can. Because that's where I'll get efficiencies. It's where I'll get smart economics and smart operations. And so, people are looking for those solutions. They know they're going to have diverse environments. They're looking for commonality that runs across those diverse environments. And Ubuntu provides a great deal of commonality across them. Mark, can you speak to Canonical's involvement in some of the projects? I know you have a lot of contributors, but where particularly did your company defend the most focus? So, OpenStack, the initial challenge with OpenStack was to deliver capability and functionality. And Canonical was one of those contributors in the early days. It was helping drive new features, helping drive new capabilities in OpenStack. More or less, we've switched to addressing that operations problem. There are many clouds out there that stuck on older versions. And for OpenStack to succeed as it moves forward, we need to be able to show you can upgrade gracefully without service interruption. And we're demonstrating that with customers. So, a lot of the work that we've been doing is how we streamline these operations. How we crowd source, if you like, best practice for operating these clouds at scale to deliver efficient value to the business. Another interesting conversation here at the show has been about containers. Both Kubernetes, and I know Canonical have been involved with LXD. And so, can you talk a little bit about the interrelation of containers with OpenStack and how you're seeing that play out? Yes, absolutely. So, containers is all over OpenStack. We do smile somewhat when people talk about containers being a new thing with OpenStack as we've been deploying OpenStack inside LXD, LXD containers for several years now. And so, many of our customers are running containerized OpenStack today in production. But there's certainly this great intersection of that. Running Kubernetes on top of OpenStack, for example, we're seeing a lot of interest in that. We deploy, as I say, our OpenStack services in containers to give flexibility around architecture choices. And we're very happy to run Canonical's distribution of Kubernetes inside of OpenStack, which we do and say have customers doing that. So, there are also people looking at how you can containerize ControlPane in other ways. We're certainly keeping tabs on that and exploring that with some customers. But containers are all across the OpenStack ecosystem. They're not competitive. They're very much sort of building a higher level of value for customers, so they have choice in how they deploy their applications. All right, Mark, anything new this week surprised you or any interesting conversations that you'd want to share? So, I came into this knowing that there was going to be a lot of discussion around containerized applications in OpenStack and containers, perhaps, on the ControlPane. The thing that has surprised me actually has been the speed with which people are looking at OpenStack for edge cloud. And cloud on the edge, it's kind of a telco thing, but cloud on the edge is how I can deliver capabilities and services, infrastructure services, in an environment, in a mobile environment, it could be attached to a cell phone mast, for example. It's not a traditional big data center, but you need to deliver content and data out to mobile devices. And so, there's a lot of discussion, especially within the telco community here at OpenStack Summit, about how OpenStack can deliver those kinds of capabilities on the edge. And that's been interesting and a surprise for me to see how quickly it's come up. All right, Mark, I want to give you the final word as to what you want people taking away of Ubuntu's participation in OpenStack. Well, some of this talk about OpenStack, you know, as it had its day in the sun, there are other things now taking over. I think people out there will need to understand that OpenStack is deeply embedded inside big companies like AT&T and like Deutsche Telekom, and it's going to be there for a decade or more, right? And so, OpenStack is definitely here to stay. We continue to see our business growing. The number of customers canonical is working with, deploying OpenStack continues to grow. Ubuntu as a platform for OpenStack continues to grow. So, it's definitely going to be part of the infrastructure as we roll forward. And yes, you'll see it working more in conjunction with those container technologies and application platforms, Paz is, for example. But it's here, it's just no longer quite the bright new shiny thing it used to be. It's kind of getting to be part of regular infrastructure. All right, well, Mark, not everything could be as bright as shiny as the, you know, Ubuntu orange shirt. So, thank you so much for joining us again, and we'll be back with more coverage here from Boston, Massachusetts. You're watching theCUBE.