 Here live inside theCUBE, this is SiliconANGLE's coverage of OpenStack Summit in Portland, Oregon. We're live for three days, wall-to-wall blanket coverage, talking to all the tech athletes we can find and always pleased to have some of the luminaries inside theCUBE. And of course I'm here with Jeff Frick, my co-host for the week. But we have the CTO of Rackspace, John and Gates, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for having me. So I see you're a luminary in the sense you got a great title, but really you're involved in a lot of the machinery at Rackspace. Obviously well-known for their business and hosting side and public companies. So that's all well out, well and good. But your journey in the cloud started out kind of just you realize quickly that you had to get to the cloud, you had an acquisition, and then you realize we got to actually retool this thing and we need developers. Yeah, we do. That's right. And then I remember talking with Lou Mormon and Jim Curry and the team, Brad. And I remember the days when it's like, this is happening, let's get a group of people together and what was not real well documented. Some of the stories out there on Wired Magazine and whatnot is that Rackspace is a passion for the industry and your experience. You had a lot of people who had experience from bare metal, dealing with infrastructure and the cloud, and you wanted to share that experience and you guys were the catalyst for OpenStack. But you didn't want to own it, and which is a very noble and it needs to be pointed out to the public that that was a key initiative for Rackspace. So one, congratulations. And the success of OpenStackup, which I'm a big fan of, and I was critical at one point, started to feel like a marketing program, quickly galvanized around code, honor, open source. It's very real now. Very real. It's no marketing program. It's a real deal. It's always been real, but the threat has always been there, right, to ride the hype. But no, the team, we heard the grade over you say, so just tell us how you're feeling about the current situation. You know, I think the situation's awesome. Our history within OpenStack is, as you describe, I mean, we were always big fans of open source software. We were big users of open source software. We saw how the web developed on open source on the backs of the LAMP stack, Lennox, Apache, MySQL, PHP, the others. And we had a lot of people internally that were contributing to various open source projects and we had an affinity to want to operate in that model. And so I think when we saw the opportunity to sort of make it, we call it make a dent in the universe. I mean, to do something really big, something bigger than ourselves, everybody sort of got excited about it. We galvanized the entire developer community at Rackspace behind this idea. The execs were, some of them were on board, some didn't understand the open source community totally and didn't understand how powerful it is once it gets moving. But we saw this opportunity and we got the first OpenStack Summit together in Austin, Texas, I don't know, what is it, almost three years ago at this point. And we got something going. And we just had to be, I mean, as a company, almost overly sort of airing on the side of openness, even more than we should have had to because we had to get that community built and started an off the ground. You guys are humble, I will say, and watching you guys up close over the years, you've got very humble, it isn't open and now it's an actual foundation. So now you guys are associated, you have a halo effect, which is what open source is about. And it's got a good stake in the ground, it has good solidarity in the community, but there's still a lot more work to do. Underneath OpenStack and above OpenStack we were just coming on with David Floyer. Could you just share your perspective in someone who's been involved in obviously the hosting side where you know infrastructure and now you got to go to a modern era, which includes scale out open source. What are the operational challenges? Well, it does require you to retool. I mean, you have to retool your entire organization. I mean, we came from an era of a lot of CIS admins, a lot of DBAs, a lot of people that knew networks and storage and now we're transforming into this DevOps culture. We're becoming in many cases a very large version of what our customers are at the startup level. These are the cultures that you're seeing here on display of companies that are using OpenStack to retool how they do software development, how they drive innovation. And we're doing that internally. And the good news for us is that being associated with an open source project like OpenStack has allowed Rackspace to attract a lot more developers. A lot of really sharp guys and ladies that are excited about contributing are now gravitating into our developer ranks to help drive what you said. A lot of work to be done. We have to continue to. And that's the ethos of open source. I mean, the halo effect is a real dynamic and there's an honor among, I don't want to say thieves, I want to say developers. But you know, there's a culture, a hacker culture, the mentality. How is that affecting your business? Because remember, you guys have a huge operation. And you have a cloud presence and you're scaling up pretty fast. And you've had some bumps along the way. We've blogged some of those in 09 and in 10. But now where are you now? I mean, you're looking down the barrel of an enterprise market that's thirsty for cloud, looking at service providers who need low latency and in some case integration of legacy applications. What are you guys, how is your business evolving technically? Well, you're right. I mean, I think there are different demands from different users of clouds. We have our public cloud. The public cloud is now fully on open stack. We are, we've hit our stride, I think, in terms of having that operationally efficient in terms of the way we roll out code releases. We're rolling code every day to that. So it's continuous integration. It's already on grizzly. It's got the whole pipeline of new features on the horizon. We're also concentrating though for enterprises on private cloud. Private cloud is where a lot of enterprises are today in terms of where they feel comfortable, where they can do what they need to do, where they can run all the workloads that are maybe behind the firewall that they can't necessarily put in the public cloud. And we're also, this week we announced a new product offering where we're enabling service providers, big telcos, small telcos, regional service providers to get into the cloud business using all the best that Rackspace has to offer. So we can take our knowledge, our expertise, our developer talent and distill it down into something that allows a service provider to get up and running very quickly. And so our goal with that is to have clouds in every context possible. Big public clouds, little private clouds, regional service providers, and have all of that available to really foster this innovation that OpenStack promises. I know Jeff wants to ask a question, but I want to ask one more question on that. Because you're talking about in a market that's very hot, it's emerging, it's rapid growth, a lot of investment going on in the end user, your end user base with the users, service providers. But with any open source projects, there's always what I call religious skirmishes, right? So what, meaning over certain philosophies of code and ways to do things, what have you seen that you've worked through, and what do you see happening now that are, I don't say religious arguments or technical arguments, what are the main threshold issues right now that people are talking about and debating and working through? Well, so interoperability is one, how do we maintain interoperability amongst OpenStack clouds? I mean, that's a topic that kind of reared up right prior to the conference, and it actually is being addressed formally within the conference, and it was already on the horizon to speak about here. So interoperability, making sure that we're all kind of staying true to OpenStack, I think it's in all of our best interest as service providers or distributions of OpenStack to make sure that we're not going off in different directions. So that's a big important one. How we, at Rackspace, for example, here's another issue that comes up, is if we're driving ahead of the pack, so to speak, I mean, we were last year doing some things to get our public cloud on OpenStack that we had to work around some things that weren't available in OpenStack yet, and we couldn't get them into OpenStack fast enough to go live on our dates that we wanted to go live on, so we did some things that weren't fully OpenStack. So this year, we've got to go back and sort of figure out how to redo those things. A little bit of work. Like what was the example? Some of our API extensions, some of the ways that we don't turn on some of the features within OpenStack, we do them a little differently on the networking side of things. So these are minor differences. They're not big differences. I mean, a customer that deploys at Rackspace and deploys at competitor cloud or private cloud, they typically use the same tools and the same APIs, but there are minor differences. This year, our goal is to really, as much as possible, get back to as pure of an OpenStack. That's the benefit of OpenStack. That's right. You can tweak the code. That's right. You can tweak the code. And jail it to your business. The flip side of it is that you can go off in a little different direction, but that's also the opportunity for innovation. If we didn't have a chance to go break a few things as we're going down this track of innovation, I mean, that's where the insight comes from. That's where the really cool things that make OpenStack so vibrant of a community come from is people being able to try things out. So it's interesting how this has really helped you transform not only your business, but the company, it sounds like, there's a new energy and, as you said, make a dent in the world. So I'm sure there's a lot of executives out there thinking we're dancing around the edge of OpenSource. We're not quite sure how to plan OpenSource. So what would you tell them in terms of really leveraging the power that comes and the excitement and the innovation to take a chance and transform your company around it? Well, I would certainly encourage people to jump in with both feet, so to speak. I think OpenSource, for us, has been something that has truly allowed us to do things that wouldn't have been possible without OpenSource software, the costs associated with some proprietary or closed-source software is prohibitive in some industries and in some contexts. Startups, for example, every startup ought to be looking at OpenSource first in every way possible. We had a great case study today with HubSpot, which is a later stage startup, but they were making the case that, I mean, literally 95 plus percent of their software is open-source within their environment. And I think that every company ought to be figuring out how to spawn a little innovative group within their organization that looks like a startup that is using OpenSource software as much as theoretically or humanly possible. I mean, I just think there's a lot of value in the communities around them. The innovation is going fast. And, you know, there is a lot of benefit in having the kinds of people on your staff that are open-source zealots. I mean, they're the guys that are the truly innovative, and if you have them inside, rather than on a vendor premise, you get some goodness from that. We're going to have Jim Curry on it, 3.30 tomorrow, Wednesday, and I think we might even have HubSpot as well, coming on as well, or you could talk about it. We have to break now, because I know you're busy, but final word I want to give to you is share with the folks, and this is, take your technical hat off, take your rack space hat off, and talk to the audience about what you see OpenStack turning into next year, because obviously the growth is fantastic. 3,000 plus a year, next event in the fall is going to be pretty big. Just, you know, what is it about? Explain to the folks out there real quickly, and then we'll end it. What has happened over the second? Where has it been built? Yeah, I mean, it is a platform that is going to power the future of IT. I mean, we're transforming the very nature of how we do IT right in front of our eyes. We are moving to a cloud world where you're provisioning what used to be done in physical hardware is now done in software, where things happen in seconds versus days and weeks. We're moving to a world where we need cloud to really do the things we want to do. Mobile devices, big data, the things that people want to do with their internet of things. All of those sort of rely on having access to this infrastructure that can scale, that's low cost, that's something that can be automated. All of that is happening here with OpenStack, and that's why I'm so excited about it. Great to have you inside the queue where the ideas will grow, and this is going to be a great area. Again, you're hearing about open source changing people's businesses. Rackspace is one of them. Major competitive advantage, opportunity to scale out, open source is changing the world, and I think you guys put a big dent in the universe, and this is the beginning. Thank you for coming inside the queue. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. Thanks.