 Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE. Covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018, brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host John Troyer, and you're watching theCUBE, the worldwide leader in tech coverage, and this is exclusive coverage from OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Usually this time of year, it's a little bit overcast, but for the second time, the OpenStack Summit has been here. The sun is shining, it's been gorgeous weather, but we're in here really digging in and understanding it, and one of the people I've gotten to know through this community especially, is our wrap-up guest for today, Shawn Michael Kerner, who is a senior editor with eWeek, amongst other bylines that you have. So pleasure to see you. Great, good seeing you too, Stu. All right, so we let you keep on the Toronto Blue Jays hat representing the town. I've had quite a few Canadians on our program here. Almost as soon as you are in Canada, that's not all that surprising. Lovely, they had you working on Victoria Day. Yeah, that's unfortunate, but I'll take Memorial Day off in a week, so it works out. Excellent, so Shawn, just for our audience that might not know you, give us a little bit about your background. You've been to umpteen of these shows. Sure, I've been at the same publication roughly, I guess 15, 16 years at this point, been writing before there was a cloud, core Linux and open source stuff and networking, and then through the magic of technology, I shifted a little bit to security, which is a core focus for me. I've been to every OpenStack summit since the San Diego summit, I guess 2011, somebody can correct me afterwards, and I didn't miss the Sydney summit for various reasons, but yeah, been to a bunch of these things, so interesting to see how things have shifted over the years from nothing to certain heights to where we are now. All right, yeah, so bring us up to that as to where we are now. There's tendencies down a little bit. They haven't been talking a lot about it, but quality of guests is here, sessions, they've broadened out a bit of the scope. We've been digging into it, but want to get your take so far. Yeah, well, it's like anything else. There's a standard hype cycles as it were. There's a trough of disillusionment. I wouldn't call this the trough of disillusionment, but when you get to a certain plateau, people just, there isn't as much interest. In the early days, I remember the San Diego summit went to, they didn't schedule it properly. They didn't know how many people they were going to have, and they had a line up around the corner and stuff that was six years ago, but that's when OpenStack was new. There was no such thing as the foundation, and everyone was just trying to figure out what was what, and there was no clue. At this point, cloud is a well understood thing. There are competitive efforts or complimentary efforts, as the foundation would probably like to put it, whether it's CNCF, there's the public cloud, and it's different. There is, with all respect to the OpenStack Foundation and its member projects, there's not as much excitement. This is now a stable, mature ecosystem, and because of that, I don't think there's as much of a draw. When something is brand new and shiny, you get more of a draw. If they would have put the name blockchain in the title somewhere, maybe, maybe they would have had a few more. They put, you know, Kubernetes in there, which is fine, but no machine learning or artificial intelligence quite yet, though that's a topic in there somewhere too. Yeah, John, you've been making a lot of comments this week talking about, we've matured, and the lower layer pieces just work a bit more. Give us your take, yeah. I mean, that's the way it seems. There wasn't a whole lot of talk about the release, the newest release, and all the different components, even the keynotes. But the people that we've talked to, both on the vendor and the customer side, I mean, they have working production, OpenStack environments. They're very large. They require very few admins. They work. They're embedded in telecom and banking and et cetera. I mean, it's here, it's working. Yeah, that's also something that happened, I guess maybe three cycles ago at this point, because they used to have the release the same time as the summit and the design summit, and it was together, so there was essentially a celebration of the release, and people would talk about the release, and then they disaggregated that. And I think that took a lot of steam out of the reason why you get developers to attend. So when you don't have the design summit, there's the separate open dev or whatever, there's the forum, I don't quite understand how that works here now. And there isn't as much momentum. Yeah, I agree with you. There's been very little talk about Queens. In each of the project update sessions I've been to, and I've been to a couple, there's always been a slide on Rocky, what's coming. Because I think, what is it? Second milestone of Rocky at this point. So there's some development, but at this point it's incremental feature ad. There's no whiz, bang, okay, we're going to have flying cars and send the Tesla to outer space, kind of earth shattering news, literally, because that's not where it's at. It's just incremental tuck in features and stability and that kind of thing. All right, so you talk space and things like that, brings to mind a certain attendee of the program that's actually been to outer space that made one of the more notable moments of the show so far. Give us your take on Mr. Shuttleworth. Well, I'm a big fan of Mr. Shuttleworth, top to bottom. Hey Mark, big fan always have been. And he has his own opinion on things, of course. Usually in a keynote, you don't tend to take direct aim at competitors and he chose to do that and it made some people a little uncomfortable. I happened to be sitting in the front row where I like to sit and there were some red-eyed people and there were some frantic emails going back and forth and people were trying to see what was going on, et cetera. And I think for me, a little bit of drama's okay. You guys go to more shows than I do and sometimes you get these sales kind of things, but in an open community there's almost an unwritten rule, which perhaps will be written after this conference, that whether or not everybody is a business competitor or not is that this is neutral territory as it were. And everybody's kind of friendly. In the exhibit hall, you can say this, that, we're better, we're whatever, but on a stage you don't necessarily do that. So there was some drama there and some of my peers wrote about that. I'll be writing about that as well. It's, I prefer to write about technology and not necessarily drama, whether somebody's faster, better, stronger than others. You let the numbers prove them out. When we talk about open source, open source innovation without Canonical, there probably wouldn't have been an open stack. All the initial open stack reference limitations are on Canonical. They've got a number of large public clouds as the Red Hat. I think they're both, have their technical merits and I'm sure on some respects it has better. I'm sure on other respects, Canonical's better, but yeah, him standing up there and beating on the competition was something that across the 13 summits I've been to, I've never seen before. We talked to my first open stack summit. It was San Diego and the CTO of VMware at the time came up and VMware was not an open stack contributor at the time. They were thinking about it and he was fielding questions about how it was competitive and not and he was still complimentary. So there's always been that kind of thing. So it's a little bit of an interesting shift, a little bit of drama. It gives this show something memorable because you and I and others will be able to talk about this five years from now, et cetera. So you talked about some of the things, something you'd write up. I mean, part of your job is to take things back to the readers of the E-week. I mean, what are some of the things that the highlights that you're going to be covering? The highlights for me was, and Stu and I had talked about this at one point off the camera is, this is not an open stack summit necessarily. They're calling it open infrastructure. I had almost thought that they would change. We almost thought that they would change the name of the entire organization to the open infrastructure foundation. So that whole shift that I know the foundation has been talking about that since Sydney last year, that they're going to shift to that. But that's the takeaway is that the platform itself is not the only thing is that enabling the open infrastructure is nice. They're going to try and play well and where it fits within the whole stack. Now, that gets very confusing because talking about collaboration is all fine and nice, but that's not necessarily news. That's how the hot dog is made and that's nice, but people want to know what's in that dog and how it's going to work. So I think this is a tougher show for me to cover than it has been in past years because there's been less news. There's no new release. There was a Cata 1.0 release and then there was the Zool project coming out on its own. The Zool project, they said it was 3.0. Actually, March, so it was Zool 303. Cata container project, okay, interesting, we'll see how it goes, but a tougher project, a tougher event for me to cover for that reason and collaboration is all fine and nice, but the CNCF, CloudNativeCon, KubeCon event two weeks ago or three weeks ago had a little bit more news and a lot of it, same kind of issues come up here. So long-winded answer. Tough to come up with lessons learned out of this other than everyone wants to be friends. Well, some people want to be and that collaboration is the way forward but that's not necessarily a new message. When I think about Kubernetes, we're talking about the multi-cloud world and that's still the last few years it's been. Where does OpenStack really fit in that multi-cloud world? One of the things I've been a little disappointed actually is most of the time when I'm having a conversation, it's almost the, well, yeah, there's public cloud but we're going to claw things back and I need it for governments, I need all of these other things and when I talk to customers, it is I'm going to choose what I put in my data center, I'm going to choose how I use probably multiple public cloud providers. It is not an anti-public cloud message and it feels a little bit on the anti-public cloud message. I wonder what you're hearing when you talk to the users when you talk to the user. What are you getting the feedback? When I talk to users, vast majority of people, unless it's something where there's regulatory issues or certain legacy issues are private cloud, public cloud period. The private cloud idea is gone or mostly gone. Like there are fewer, when I think of private cloud, it's really VMware, okay? We've got virtualized instances that's sitting there. What's OpenStack? OpenStack is fine, but how many people are running OpenStack as a private cloud on premise? Yeah, so what does OpenStack do? When I think of OpenStack, Oracle's public cloud, Oracle is not here, surprisingly. Oracle's public cloud and Larry Ellison, who I know you guys have spoken to more than once on theCUBE at various points or Oracle World and other things. Oracle's public cloud, they want to compete against AWS. That's all OpenStack, IBM cloud, all OpenStack. The various big providers out of China are OpenStack-based, OVH is here. So that's where it fits in is that underlying infrastructure layer. There's also Walmart users at Best Buy, all these other places, Comcast, et cetera, AT&T, but individual enterprises, not so much. I have a hard time finding individual enterprises that will tell me we are running our own private cloud as OpenStack. They'll tell me they're running VMware, they might tell me they're running Rev or even some flavor of Citrix and server, but not a private cloud. They may have some kind of instances and then they'll burst out. But it's not, I don't think private cloud for mid-tier enterprises ever took off the way that some people might've thought five years ago. That's interesting. Frumla, maybe let's go meta for a second. As you, we've talked a little bit about stuff you do and don't write about, right? You don't necessarily write, the VCs aren't here necessarily, but you don't write about necessarily financial stuff? Because you're- Well, sometimes, but there was actually the Portland Summit. I did a panel with press and analysts at the time and then afterwards there might've been four different VCs that came up to me and asked me what I thought about different companies because they're looking at different things where they would invest. And I remember we looked at the board, one VC who shall remain nameless and I said, you know what? We'll look at this board of all these companies five years from now, three quarters of them won't be here. I think I was probably wrong because it's more than that. There are so many, and I wrote a story about, and I don't remember the exact name of it, but I wrote a story not that long ago, an open-stack Deadpool. There are multiple companies that raised funding that disappeared. In the networking space, there were things like Plumgrid. They got it minorly acquired for assets by VMware if I'm not mistaken. There was Pivotal, Joshua McKenzie, one of the co-founders of open-stack itself and they got acquired by Cisco, but they would have collapsed perhaps otherwise. Nebula Computing is perhaps still, it still shocks me. They raised whatever it was, 50 AUD million and somebody will correct me afterwards with Chris Kemp. You know, CTO of NASA who helped start it, gone. So there's been tremendous consolidation and I think when VCs lose money, they lose interest really fast. The other thing you have to think about from the VC side, they don't write too much on the financial. My good friend, Frederick, who didn't make it, where are you, Frederick, where are you? Does more on that funding side. But has there been a big exit for an open-stack company? Not really, not really. And without that kind of thing, without that precedent, it's a tough thing, especially for a market that's now eight years old, give or take. Nobody's had a big exit. Even the exits that had a decent exit that bought into, say, the IBMs and Cisco's of the world. And when you look a couple of years later, there's not much left of those organizations. Yeah, it's also really hard. People really don't want to compete against, well, some people want to compete against AWS, but if you're going to try and go toe-to-toe with them, it's challenging. Okay, so what brings you back here every year? You're speaking at the show, you're talking to people. Yeah, what brings you back here every year is, regardless of the fact that the momentum has probably shifted, it's not in that early hype stage. Open-stack is core infrastructure, literally core infrastructure that runs important assets, internet assets, whether it's certain public cloud vendors, large Fortune 500 companies or otherwise. So it's an important piece of the stack, whether it's in the hype cycle or not. So that brings me back because it's important. It brings me back because I have a vested interest because I've written so much about it, so I'm curious to see how it continues to evolve. Specifically, I'm speaking here on Thursday, doing a panel on defending the cloud castle security as core competence and a core interest for me. And with all these Open-stack assets out there, how they are defended or not is a critical interest because in the modern world, cyber attacks are a given. Everybody should assume that they're always under a constant state of attack and how that security works is a core area of interest. That's why I'll keep coming back. Also keep coming back because I expect there to be another shift. I don't think we've heard the end of the Open-stack story yet. I think the shift towards Open infrastructure will evolve a little bit and it will come to an interesting conclusion. All right, last thing is, what's your favorite question you're asking at this show? Have any final things you want to ask us as we wrap? Yeah, my favorite, well, I'll ask you guys, what was the most interesting answer that you got from all the great people that you interviewed? Because I'm sure some of it was negative and you got mostly positive as well. Well, we are used to answering the questions, Stu. Well, you see, I'm used to being on the other side here, right? Well, I mean, like I do, I do say we got a lot of stuff about some interesting edge use cases. Like I say, the practitioners I talked to were real. I was always impressed by how few administrators it takes to run a huge Open-stack-based cloud once it's set up. So I mean, that's some of the interesting things for me. You asked folks about a public cloud a lot. Yeah, so it's been interesting. For me, we've reached that certain maturity level. I was looking at technology. What's kind of the watermark that this is going to come to? We had said years ago, I don't think you're going to have somebody selling a billion dollars' worth of distribution on Open-stack. So that story with how Kubernetes and containers and everything fits in, Open-stack is part of the picture and it might not be the most exciting thing, but then again, if you watch Linux as long as most of us have, look, Red Hat took a really long time to get a billion dollars and it was much more than just Linux. It got them there. This still has the opportunity to be tooling inside the environment. We've talked to a number of users that use it. It's in there. It's not the flagpole, you know, we're an Open-stack company anymore because there really aren't many companies saying that that is the core to their mission, but it's still an important piece of the overall fabric of what we're covering. Yeah, completely agree. All right, well on that note, Sean Michael Kerner, really appreciate you joining us. Please support good technology journalism because it is people like him that help us understand the technology. I read his stuff all the time and I always love chatting with him off the record and dragged him on here. And yeah, Frederick from TechCrunch, we are disappointed that you couldn't join us, but we'll get you next time. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Be sure to join us for the third day tomorrow of three days of wall-to-wall live coverage here from Open-stack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. And once again, thank you for watching theCUBE.