 Live from the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering OpenStack Silicon Valley 2016. Brought to you by Morantis. Now, here's your host, Lisa Martin. Hi everyone, welcome back to theCUBE. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and we are live at OpenStack Days SV, OpenStack Days Silicon Valley, hashtag OSSV16, or hashtag OpenStack SV. We've been here for the last couple of days really understanding from the OpenStack community what's going on, what's the innovation. We are the flagship program of SiliconANGLE, theCUBE, and we are here to extract the signal from the noise. I'm very excited to be joined by two guests here from Rackspace. We've got Ken Hoy, technical marketing manager from Rackspace, and we've got Kenny Johnston, who is a senior product marketing manager at Rackspace. Welcome gentlemen. Thank you, thank you very much. We're excited to have you guys on theCUBE. Obviously Rackspace, part of the genesis of OpenStack back in 2010, we saw great statistics that came out of the Austin Summit a couple of months ago, 7,500 attendees. The buzz is great, 54,000 participants in the community. You've got over 600 companies participating in OpenStack. Talk to us about, as an early adopter of OpenStack, Rackspace went head to head against Amazon. Talk to us about those early days. What was it that you saw as really an opportunity engine in this open source world? Well yeah, I'll go ahead. Well I was going to say, from our perspective, the decision that Rackspace made to open source and build a community around OpenStack was really about us building an alternative to Amazon in some places. And we certainly had a public cloud that was and is an infrastructure provider. It was really about building a community and providing an open sourced alternative. And I think, you know, over the years and the six years since OpenStack was born, we've really seen that bare fruit. We have contribution from, as you said, 600 different companies. It's really become less of a Rackspace-owned thing and something that there's a whole broader community of a lot of really innovative folks working on a regular basis. So we were talking before we went live today. In the public cloud Rackspace has tens of thousands of customers. You've got also on the private cloud side, you've also got hundreds of customers there. Talk to us about Rackspace's current strategy. Are you stuck in the middle of being a public cloud provider or private cloud, hybrid cloud? Kind of what is that current strategy from Rackspace's senior management's perspective? Sure. As you may know, we very recently adopted a model where we would bring what we call fanatical support to not only to our public cloud and our private cloud, but also to other clouds like AWS and Azure. So this is really part of a strategy of saying, we believe this is a multi-cloud world and that most, especially in private customers, aren't going to deploy on just one cloud. So we want to be able to support all the clouds and be able to bring fanatical support and have our customers be successful wherever they want to put their workloads. So that heterogeneity is key. And that's the world of technology today, right? It is heterogeneous and obviously the support needs to be there. I love that term fanatical support. As we were talking earlier and really the theme of OpenStack Days, SB, is unlocked. We talk about customers wanting OpenStack so they don't have that vendor lock-in. There's so much innovation, you know, all of the changes in technology that are really sort of this cycle predicating more innovation, but it also breeds complexity. So on this crazy train of innovation that we're all on, how do you, what's the culture of Rackspace to deliver this fanatical support, allowing your customers to achieve their business goals and satisfy the needs of their customers? What's that focus? I would describe it in kind of simple terms as expertise. We continue to invest in making sure that our people are the foremost experts in OpenStack and that comes from operational experience over a significant amount of time. You know, this plays out in all of our technology offerings outside of OpenStack but we really try to focus on making sure that we can deliver to our customers a set of expertise so that they can consume these technologies without having to worry about complexity, without having to get into this race of staying up with innovation because we're doing that for them. So it's really about us investing in the expertise that we've built and in some cases that expertise is in the form of actual human capital who have the knowledge about what's going on in the code and what's changing and where things are headed. In some cases it's about building tooling that enables our operators and users to consume OpenStack in a more friendly way. Excellent, so you guys just gave, in case you missed it, they gave a breakout session at OpenStack days just a few minutes ago. Share with us with the folks who weren't able to attend. What are those best practices that you've shared with the community today in terms of helping companies manage private and public clouds? Help us understand and learn from Rackspace's experience in that. I think, Kenny, if I get a little more specific, I think the overall theme we wanted to get across is that, as you mentioned, technology is so complex these days that the only way that any customers can successfully manage that is to automate as much as possible. I think we're beyond the era where everything should be handcrafted, right? Infrastructure should be completely automated in every way and we mean that in terms of whether it's security or workload management or upgrades, we want everything to be as automated as possible and we focus on doing that on our clouds and we want to focus on helping customers do that on whatever cloud they want to run on. What are some of the challenges or maybe landmines that you've seen customers experience in this that have come to Rackspace to say, we can't do this ourselves, we need your help? Yeah, I mean there are kind of perennial questions around OpenStack. A couple of years ago it was really about how do I deploy this thing? Customers would come to us thinking about OpenStack as this mess of Legos and they didn't really know how to assemble it into one coherent thing that they could then consume. And so we've worked and put a lot of effort in building tooling to be able to deploy OpenStack in a kind of prescriptive way that we believe is taking those Legos and assembling it into something meaningful. That tooling is now upstream. It's something we're very proud of contributing back to the community. But there's also other components around, for instance, one of the big things that operators tell us is, I'm fearful that as I deploy OpenStack, I'm going to have to have a team of 20 or 30 people who work day and night to keep this thing up and running. So we're contributing back some of the best practices that we learned in operating the world's largest OpenStack public cloud in what we call our fleet management set of tools that help, you know, we have tens of thousands of servers in our public cloud and a very small team that can manage those because we put a lot of automation into our infrastructure management. So those are a couple of things we hear about today. Customers worried about upgrades. It's really hard to upgrade OpenStack a couple of cycles ago. You saw trends that people were avoiding getting access to this new innovation that was in upcoming OpenStack releases because they were fearful of what an upgrade might do to their environment. And we put a lot of effort into our operator tooling and within the given projects to make upgrades less painful. So those are some of the things we hear from customers that we've really tried to drive back. And as we look going forward, you know, we see competition from some of the big public cloud providers. We also see some of the public cloud providers. Here, Microsoft, James Staten, who was a guest on theCUBE this morning with John Furrier and I, was also a keynote and a really interesting insight that these bigger players are understanding. You talked about it, Ken, the heterogeneity. They need to be able to facilitate that because that's the lay of the land for most companies. As we look at this competition that's coming from these public cloud providers, talk to us about some of the big opportunities that RackSpace sees to edge ahead. Yeah, Ken touched on this earlier. I don't think we think of ourselves as in competition with public cloud providers. We are pursuing a strategy where, you know, I think we firmly believe that the future is a multi-cloud world and all of our customers come to us with needs that might span clouds or we have different customers who have a preference for certain clouds. And as a fanatical support company, as a company that's providing technology expertise in a managed service fashion, it's incumbent upon us to develop that level of expertise with whatever the common platforms are. So, you know, we have a very thriving Microsoft's public and private cloud practice same with our Amazon web managed fanatical support for Amazon web services. So, I don't think we think of it as a competition, per se. Yeah, and RackSpace is obviously a big believer in open source. And one of the key tenants of open source is people get to choose. Right. So, we're not really about locking down customers and saying you can only use this cloud and no other. We want to make sure customers can succeed in whatever cloud they want. So, again, we're just investing, making investments and making sure that's going to be possible for all our customers, no matter which cloud they choose. Right. Kenny, maybe you can share with us some examples of some success stories of customers that are using RackSpace's open or public cloud based on OpenStack, as well as private clouds. Can you give us an example of a customer that you've seen do that very successfully and be able to focus on their core competencies by leveraging your services? Yeah, I'm not sure if I want to name specific names on the top of my head. That's okay. But yeah, we have lots of customers who come to us and say all the way from born on the web gaming companies who might really want to hand to RackSpace the management of their infrastructure so they can eke out as much of it as possible for their application to Fortune 100 banks who might come to RackSpace for the expertise in actually driving adoption of OpenStack internally. So they come to us and say, we want you to manage this, but we also want your help in making sure that we train all of our developers and enable them to use this infrastructure platform that we're deploying because it's really not a success until we see widespread adoption. And so we see kind of those two classes of customers very frequently. And we've built a really robust support offering to enable additional enhanced services for those customers who need really the advice for how to get the most of their infrastructure or how to make sure that the adoption of OpenStack is kind of takes hold within their organization. Two of the common stories we hear is, one is we've got customers who say, I've been trying to deploy OpenStack for a year and we just can't get it to work. And they'll come to us because we're the experts. Or another use case is customers saying, you know what, I can't hire enough OpenStack engineers to actually run my day-to-day operations. So they come to us because they know they can just have us do it for them. And they can take the money they were spending hiring engineers, operators, and they can focus on hiring developers to build workers on top. So. And that's an interesting point that you mentioned because one of the things that has been talked about at the summit the last couple of days is that this demand for education for OpenStack, it shows the demand for the technology. And so they've set up this certification program. So it sounds like you're seeing that exact very thing come and manifest. One of the things I want to touch on is, we talked before we went live, Kenny, about who's the target audience? What part of an organization is coming to Rackspace to get help? We've tried this or we can't hire enough. You're talking to the CTO. Talk to us about what are the core business outcomes that that CTO and his or her CEO is looking to achieve by, for example, pushing everything into a public cloud on Rackspace. What's the business objectives that you're helping your customers achieve? Technology abstracted. I think it's one word, it's agility. Customers are really looking for this cloud infrastructure platform that enables them to move more rapidly, produce time to market, innovate faster. And that's something that frankly their developers are experiencing in public cloud or other fashions today and they feel like they're inhibited from doing internally because they don't have access to a true cloud infrastructure platform like OpenStack. So really they're coming to us saying, we want to be agile, we have competitive pressures, our competition is moving fast, we need to move faster. I mean, we're helping kind of provide a managed service platform to enable them to keep up. And what are some of that measurable metrics that you've seen customers achieve in terms of reduction in cost or operational efficiency? What are some of the big things that stand out that really Rackspace has helped drive from your customer's business standpoint? You know, so like I talked about, some of it is time to market. There are certainly cost advantages to OpenStack over other infrastructure or cloud platforms. Another I think really interesting one is this concept of resiliency. So a lot of our customers whose businesses are dependent upon their infrastructure being live 24 seven, measure the effectiveness of that infrastructure based on their downtime. I mean, for us to be able to point to customers who survive the world's largest e-commerce crushes on Black Friday or whatever that might be with zero downtime on an OpenStack infrastructure, that's really proof to them that they lose dollars for every second they're down. So that's a kind of critical metric. Mission critical. So a couple final things here as we wrap up. In terms of where OpenStack is today, yesterday, Jonathan Bryce talked about standardization being the number one business driver. They also talked about wanting more companies to share their successes. Where OpenStack is today, things we might hear in Barcelona in a couple of months. What's the future with Rackspace and OpenStack? What does that look like? Yeah, so we obviously have always been committed to OpenStack and continue to do so. I think one of the things you're going to see in the coming months and years is even a stronger commitment to saying we want OpenStack to be widely adopted and we want people to not have to relearn all the lessons that we've already learned, right? Scaling a large OpenStack cloud. So one of the things we're very much focused on is working with the community, especially the operators, to say before you run into this problem, we've already seen it and here's how we fixed it so that we can kind of smooth out some of those rough, a lot of those bumps so that we can get wider adoption. Excellent. And Kenny, I'll give you the last word here. Speaking of community, which Ken just mentioned, what's your impression of the community of OpenStack folks that are here at the summit? What's exciting you by the things that you're hearing? Yeah, just stopping and thinking about the fact that we're talking about an open source community that spans hundreds of companies, thousands of developers across all sorts of geographies. It's pretty amazing that there's this kind of collaboration engine that's innovating a piece of software as complex as OpenStack is. In my mind, I'd like to take pause and think how amazing it is that we're shipping a regular release of OpenStack on all the hard work and blood, sweat, and tears that goes into that. But you know, I love the fact that as an ecosystem, we continue to bring in new participants. You heard a lot in the Austin Summit about making sure OpenStack is integrated with the other ecosystem players and really focusing on ensuring the long-term success of OpenStack by adopting and integrating with new technology patterns like containers or et cetera. And so it's that kind of thing that when I talk to people who are developers or talk to people involved, I definitely get the sense that they are inspired to be part of this large community and really ready to tackle kind of the world's next infrastructure problems. I like that inspiration, and I think you did a great summary of really articulating the innovation, the collaboration that has not only is responsible for the genesis of OpenStack, but also what is going to come in the future. John and I talked the last couple of days about sort of this zigzag effect that's going on with the technology. You mentioned containers. What's next for OpenStack? Tremendous amount of opportunity because of this community. I think it's clear from what we've seen over the last two days that OpenStack is now not in survive mode, it's in thrive mode, and I think that sentiment has been not only articulated by the two of you in Rackspace, but also by the other attendees here today. So Ken Hoy, Kenny Johnston, thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE today. Thank you. And thank you for watching theCUBE. Again, we're live from the OpenStack Days SV, hashtag OSSSV. We'll be right back with our final rep for the day. I'm going to be joined by John Furrier, so come right back.