 Computer Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Silicon Valley 2015. Brought to you by Morantis. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Frick. Hey, welcome back everyone. Hello, we are live in Silicon Valley for theCUBE Silicon Angles flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal and noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Jeff Frick. Our second day of coverage of the OpenStack Silicon Valley conference, hashtag OpenStackSV, hashtag OSSV15, join the conversation, go to crowdchat.net slash OSSV15, but we have all the commentary there threaded on our CrowdChat app built on the cloud, built on Amazon. Our next guest is Derek Holson, founder and CEO of Epsera. Welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you. Yeah, good to see you guys as well. You know cloud pretty well. You've been at VMware, you got your start up here. You've been guys doing a lot of great work. The first question is, you know, what's going on with the cloud? Is there a hybrid cloud out there? Is there a category? What does it mean? I mean, we know what public is. We see that every day, Amazon. We know what private cloud is. Is it connecting them as hybrid? Is hybrid cloud just an engineering issue? What's your take on this? Yeah, it's a great question. I think, you know, similar to when no one knew what cloud was and they all started talking about it and we're trying to figure it out. We're in the same way respect the hybrid cloud. The difference is, is everything is compressed. So people will figure it out. But to your point, I think people's version of hybrid cloud now is we have some apps running here and some apps running in a cloud and then never the two shall meet or talk or communicate. What I think is interesting though is going forward, you know, we're going to look at a multi-cloud world where everything is actually put together. The problem right now and one of my opinions, barrier entries outside the obvious of security and trust, which Afsara was born to kind of instill in our customers, is people are expensive. It's the only thing in IT that's getting more expensive. And right now when people say, I've got Amazon and if I want to add in something else, I need to add more headcount. That understand how to port to that platform. That understand how to manage that platform. And that's very prohibitive. But what's interesting is is that, you know, it used to be around cost, you know, it used to be around maybe geo footprint. My opinion is the battle for the cloud is around class of services. And it's a very different game. You know, Amazon is the 800 pound gorilla. So it was Microsoft at one point in time. Now what's interesting from my perspective is, you know, I've heard of certain customers leaving but the only reason they leave it isn't for cost. Yeah, it isn't for cost. It's, ooh, I want to use Watson. That machine learning, you know, technology because it really augments my app and drives business value. So it's going to be interesting to see. But what happened was in my understanding, I could be wrong, but is they had to pick all of the apps out of Amazon and then move them over. Cause they're like, we can't actually do too. I think that's going to converge and- Well, that is true. That is currently the case. You got to use blue mix, got to have some Watson bolted onto blue mix. But that brings up the question that we were talking on the queue earlier here. It opens stack as it finds this home. It's kind of finding it's swim land. I don't think it truly has yet. I mean, at first it was an alternative to Amazon. Now there's a workload issue going on. But the issue is, okay, I want to run certain things this way. I have built in infrastructure. I bought servers from Dell and HP. I got storage from EMC. I got some Oracle. I have a lot of stuff in my infrastructure. I want to run Amazon because it actually, you can reduce headcount by going to Amazon. No more system admins. DevOps, ethos gets a developer platform. You can move the ball down the field. But at some point you do need to meet in the middle. Yeah. So talk about that dynamic of meeting in the middle as companies try to figure out, okay, I get some economic savings with Amazon. Pretty obvious. Redshift is disrupting data warehouse market. Cost-wise. But the headcount issues one, the capex, op-ex issues the other. The other ones, I got developers and workloads. How do you, TZ, how do you talk to customers about those issues? Well, a lot of times, I mean, when we were up in Vancouver for the previous OpenStack summit, our big value prop outside of the Trusted Cloud Platform, which is what we drive was, you have this investment in OpenStack. How do you actually transition that seamlessly to multiple public cloud providers? And at least within Vancouver, everyone was like, we have no clue how to do that. Now, to be straightforward though, a lot of our customers, at least that we're talking to, they're like, yeah, we're going to do that. But first, let's figure out how to consolidate what we already have, right? We're in a capex cycle. We don't want to spend the capex. We want to try to figure out how to move those workloads through the cloud. And can you help us do that? Or what technologies are out there? To your point about OpenStack, not finding it swiveling, I agree. It's just kind of gotten to that point where it's technically viable enough to maybe start running production workloads. And next thing you know, they take their eye off the rear of your mirror and containers come and just fly straight past them. And so a lot of the themes I'm hearing around here is, no, no, we're still relevant. This is why, because we're Project Magnum and we're going to do this and do this with containers. And the only thing I can say is the technology cycles are compressing so fast. The things are moving so fast. And the use cases in the enterprise are completely different by enterprise. And so that private cloud market seems robust right now. But the public cloud has got some benefits. Yeah, I think OpenStack's doing well there. They're gaining momentum. It's still very complex. Companies like Merantius are doing well because they help you figure out how to stand up this thing. Distribute systems are complex, right? But when you look at that and you look at the ways of simplification for cloud and you go, all right, let's say I have Docker, the new tar ball format for workloads, and I can try to figure out how to deploy it on an OpenStack thing here, maybe with Project Magnum, or I shoot it into Amazon or Google or DigitalOcean or I think maybe Software Support. What's easier for DevOps? And we've talked about this before. If it's easier for DevOps, that's eventually going to win because that gets them to go faster. And you mentioned containers and the technology cycles are shortening, which I agree. And if people believe that to be true, containers really kind of telegraphs what's happening. A lightweight, easy to stand up set of services. So the question I have for you is if that's the case, and Kubernetes certainly on the orchestration side shows that as well, is OpenStack bloated? Are they too heavy? I mean, lightweight seems to be something that's a theme we're hearing in the hallways. It's not on the tracks yet, but like starting here, I want a lightweight stand up and also I want to work with my coexisting investments. Yeah, I mean, I totally agree. And on this morning's panel, I just talked about, we can talk about container technology. It's neat, it's fun to geek out about it. But I think what people might be missing is that everything wants to get faster, lighter, cheaper, better, all of the stuff. And to a point where it really can't and it actually fundamentally changes the way you do things. That's the big wake up call. And right now we're at a point where people are starting to think about architecting systems by saying, I'll build just this much and I'm going to assemble all the other pieces together. And so how you figure out how to be relevant in that world, I think, is applicable to OpenStack. I mean, like I said, the theme around, hey, containers are over-hyped, but even if they are, we're relevant in a container-based world, it shows that they're all of a sudden going, hey, we feel like we're stuck out in the cold all of a sudden. So I got to ask you a question. We talked to Shang Liang earlier, CEO of Rancher Labs, xcloud.com guy, been around Web 1.0 infrastructure all the way up to the present. Smart guy. She's a pretty peaked out PhD from Yale. He's pretty smart. To get into Yale, you got to be smart. But he had an interesting comment. I'm talking about containers. I asked him, what is the disruptive enabler? And he said, and he's in the container business, containers aren't a radical disruption element. And I said, it's an accelerant. He's like, absolutely. So if you believe that containers are an accelerant, what is the underlying disruption happening in cloud? Yeah, I mean, and Shang and I talked about this on the panel this morning quite a bit. And he's got a container company. But every early technology pass, which as you know I was quite a part of, we use containers, we use that tech. When you look at companies that we're looking at as bleeding edge past the Google, but maybe like a Netflix, they were using very big AMIs and plugging kind of stuff together as a services oriented architecture. I think the big disruptor now is that if it's a container and it's extremely lightweight, and there's a repository of them that are supported by the vendor, so I can build faster by building less and I assemble more. To me, and Shang and I have talked about this before. I said, that's the disrupting thing that's happening. All the other technologies are really, in my opinion, just there to support that. I love that line, building less, assembling more. That's a great motto. That's a good sound bite we want to mark that. And so light that they're even disposable. I mean, people talk about containers, so many of them that they can almost become disposable. They're so lightweight to build and implement. Oh yeah, and you can spin these things up and then tear them right down. And we're getting to the point where you can spin them up and tear them down before anyone realizes that they might be there, right? To instantaneously respond to something, finish up whatever service level they need to and then they can tear themselves down. And again, that's, in my opinion, disruptive because that's really not possible with VMs. You're not going to figure out how to spin up a couple hundred VMs and then tear them down two minutes later because it's going to take you 10, 15 minutes maybe at best just to spin them up. And then how are they going to coordinate? How are they going to actually figure out how to be trusted and driven by policy? Again, part of AppSera's DNA. But with containers, right, think about it, they're sub one second. But I can tell you already that if you look at companies like Bromium, Simon Crosby, who we both know, he kind of touted micro task virtualization, which is they can spin thousands of those up a second. And again, the pattern and the disruption keeps going. And so if I can spin a thousand things up in a couple hundred milliseconds and have them kind of run very isolated, so we solve the security problems, we solve the stuff, the stuff, people's patterns begin to change about how they use it. And that's kind of the big disruption. When your behavior change, that's disruptive. Not as you just keep doing the same thing and doing it faster, all right? So I got to ask you, you've been at VMware, you've seen the evolution you're involved in some of the cloud thing. And like a former cloud guy at VMware, Jerry Chen, who's an investor in Docker, you guys have been there from the early days on the drawing board, if you will, of the VMware's view of the cloud. So they have their own challenge. We'll hear more about that next week at VMworld. The queue will be live in San Francisco next week for three days. Azure's got a lot of traction in the VMware ecosystem. We've been noticing some signaling in the marketplace around that. VMware is trying to become a cloud player. Obviously they have some corporate issues around EMC and the Federation, you know, with the Wall Street attack from the Elliott management. That aside, customers are going to have a lot of stuff. You're going to have multiple clouds. You're going to have Azure, Oracle, OpenStack, and you guys maybe and whatnot. What is the VMware plan in your mind? What should they be looking at? What should VMware be thinking about? Obviously we're going to hear about DevOps at the event. They're a little mini event going on. Are they doing the right things? Or should they be looking at something different? What's the, if you're at VMware, what would you do? Wow, that's a pretty loaded question, but I like it. You guys always do that too. Yeah, I'm not privy to kind of the things that VMware is doing today, but I'm still friends with Kitt and a lot of people over there. What I think is kind of interesting, at least in my opinion, and again, they could argue that I'm wrong. You know, we're here at an OpenStack conference. OpenStack exists because of VMware. Linux became extremely popular because of Microsoft. Their failure to adapt and actually change some of their models. And I just like Microsoft is really kind of, re-birthing itself and under Satya's lead with Azure and things like that is now, suddenly people are starting to talk about it and Windows 10 is actually good stuff. I think VMware read the tea leaves and they're already down that path of, all right, how we become relevant in a container-based world where Docker's important, where people are going to bridge their VMware technology investments from that to a public cloud. And I know Kitt is the one that I know, but obviously there's a lot of talented people over there. They read the tea leaves and I think they're on the right path. But you got to back up what you say. And I think one of the things I watched with Microsoft who they went on a 10-year turn where it was tough for them, right? Especially in the hearts and minds of enterprises that were trying to do new things. VMware's earlier in the cycle and they're pushing, I think you guys and of course we'll be watching closely as well some of the announcements out of VMworld which is still one of the best attended conferences ever will really signal how much weight they've been putting behind the arrow of saying we need to change, we need to adopt. It's not about the hypervisor. It's not about the management systems per se. It's about how do we enable businesses to go faster? And they have a good install base to build off of. They're in a good position. As did Microsoft. So when they made the turn, they still have a huge customer base to go back to. Yeah, Windows 10 was 75 million plus. And Office 365, as the description. So I got to ask you once you have an unopinionated perspective which we love your opinions here in theCUBE. Of course, great insight and content. You were on a tweet seven hours ago. What you want on a dialogue about where we are in the platform ecosystem and what it all means. Come by and listen with a link to your panel. Also you're here on theCUBE live, so let's go to it. But also you say another quote on the under the company handle. The unopinionated systems will win. Yeah. A reality check. Talk about the dynamics around platform wars in the ecosystem. Systems are changing. Developers are the lifeblood of ecosystems. APIs are the lifeblood of the ecosystem. And what does unopinionated systems mean? Yeah, I mean, you know, I was part of the opinionated systems, right? To figure out how to deploy complex workloads by being very opinionated. Just hand me your application. I'll figure out everything else for you. And we were trying to solve a very specific problem around speeding up deployment. Problem is that wasn't the problem. It was the problem that was right in front of us. But the problem when you see the force through the trees is embracing complex systems, driving trust. In the meantime, as we were going down our path and other past providers were going down their path, something happened. It was called Docker. And guess what? Docker does not want the deployment system to have any opinions about what's running inside of it. Right? It's a whole everything's in the container. Don't worry about it. And so whether you agree with me or not or my tweets, if you do a Google trend analysis between all of the technologies that are like past providers and the word Docker, you're going to see that they flatline. There is no competition. And Docker is very unopinionated. Meaning that, how about this, John? The better way to look at it is the opinion shifts back to the power of the developers. And that doesn't always work. But when you look at Docker, it's like, no, it's all about my opinion. I'm going to pick what version of Java and what app server and what this, what that or whatever, I'm going to put all in this container and I'm going to hand it to IT ops. And I just want you guys to run it. And so when you look at a platform that says, no, no, you hand me the app and I'll figure out all the pieces, those things are at odds, right? Now, what F-SER tries to do is say, we embrace both models, we could care less, but IT ops has to be empowered to say, well, we actually do care about what's inside of there. Does it have zero day exploits? Is it running the version that, you know, the company is blessed version of Java, whatever like that. So being agile and being understanding, I guess, how about this? Where the opinion has shifted is the important part. And when a platform is very opinionated about how you as a developer do something, those are the ones that I think are going to be kind of left behind. Yeah, because they close a lot of opportunity because they're projecting syntax onto the developer. Yeah, so they rapidly speed up, but they only speed up this much of the problem. And once the customer realizes that they're only actually helping with this much of the problem, they kind of scratch their head and they go, oh, well, all right, now what do we do? All right, talk about AppSare real quick, we got a break here, but I want you to get the plug in. AppSare, what's going on with the company? Headcount, strategy, positioning? Yeah, well, we've been growing quite rapidly. We're over 100 people now. We were only about 21, less than a year ago. No gray hairs, you're looking good there, you're looking. Oh no, they're there, they are there. Yeah, we're driving the trusted cloud platform. All we really care about is multi-cloud, single policy framework. We just happen to run a lot of the enforcement points, like a scheduling algorithm and a runtime, although we're a founder of OCI and a network layer, but they only exist to drive trust into a platform. And so we've talked even early on, three and a half years ago when we started a company, if you make a decision but you can't enforce it, you can't have trust. And so a lot of these things you're seeing is, oh, policy says you can't do this, but you can, and then all of a sudden you get your name in the paper. So we're all about- So you guys are betting on complex systems, large scale and trust? We're actually flipping the problem on its head. We're betting on a trusted cloud platform that embraces multi-cloud and complexity or microservices, right? The decomposition system, so. Distribute computing, whatever you want to call it. Same one, different phone. I know all the words. Free computing, distributed computing. Customers just want solutions right now. They want security, they want trust, they want to run at a very good price point. Yeah, and trust is something that's very hard to articulate, but you know when you don't have it. Okay, so final, final question. Amazon's disrupting data warehouse with Redshift. That's just one random example. What are you guys disrupting? What is the big disruption for you guys? Are you guys taking down a certain market problem? What disruption are you guys doing? Yeah, essentially we are all about deploying diverse workloads in a multi-cloud platform all with a policy-driven framework that actually enforces everything the same way on every public cloud provider and vSphere and OpenStack and BareMetal. And so when you look at the notion of saying, I want a workload to actually maybe migrate or scale up and move, we literally do that in seconds with no code changes, nothing at all. And we embrace Docker natively, but we also embrace other workloads because it's a diverse world. All right, Derek Collison, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Great to have your insight and we'll debate anytime with any other player about hybrid cloud, anytime you want to meet and get people together we're happy to broadcast that live. Insight here on theCUBE about the future cloud we'll be back with more from Silicon Valley after this short break.