 From Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE covering DockerCon 2017 brought to you by Docker and support from its ecosystem partners. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is the Cube's coverage of DockerCon 2017 here in Austin, Texas. Getting towards the end of our two days of coverage, really been geeking out on a lot of the technology here and I was happy to be able to pull in. Two guys I know have had them on theCUBE before to really go in as to how this whole container wave is impacting their business, they go into the technology some, so I want to welcome back to the program. First, John White is the Vice President of Product Strategy with Expedient, who I'm happy to see not wearing his football jersey. John, thanks for joining me again. And you, Piscar, who is the CTO of OGD, I had the pleasure of interviewing you over in Europe last year to show, so welcome over to Austin. I think Vienna and Austin, wo meet coma at both of those places, so yeah, it seems every time we get together, there's a lot of that going on. There's always a meat excuse, right? All right, so maybe start with you. Have you been to DockerCon before? What's your experience been here at the show so far? Yeah, so this is my second DockerCon. I've been here last year as well in Seattle. And I'm kind of liking the vibe this time around. So last year it was really all about developers. Kind of liking it more about the enterprise right now. As an enterprise guy, work for an MSP, so we deal with a lot of enterprises and it's good to see that Docker is giving the enterprise a lot of thought and a lot of attention because that was one area where they were lacking last year. Yeah, so John, you look at a lot of the ecosystem. You're also a service provider. What's your take so far? Yeah, so this is the first time for me at DockerCon. I go to a lot of conferences, so I read the room a little bit differently, I guess, than most. It's been interesting for me. These two days have been jam-packed. I've been soaking up a lot of new knowledge and new vendors, new potential partners for us to look into. But I'll agree, I think a lot of the focus on the enterprise, figuring out maybe how this is relevant to them in the future is actually a really great way to go and I hope to see more of that. Looking for those use cases right now is a little bit hard, especially when you have people like Visa that have been working on this for a few years now and only six months into production. We're just so very, very early in this technology that I think we're still walking maybe, probably still crawling even through it. Yeah, before we go into the tech, let's talk about ecosystem. So it's a word that I heard over and over again in the keynote, John, I was talking with you at VMworld at AWS Free Invent. As a service provider, sometimes it feels like body blows and headshots go into some of these shows because how are they partnering with you? How do you see Docker? What kind of things do they build? How does that help or hurt your business? Yes, to Docker as a company, we really haven't worked with them quite yet. The ecosystem though is interesting here. There's a lot of new faces here, a lot of faces that I've interacted with from the virtualization days, now kind of porting over to here. So I've already started to reach out to some of them to kind of get an understanding, like for instance a risk on the networking side, what they're doing, how they're actually interacting with Docker and I think that's going to be really important because I think that's going to be one of my bigger challenges in the future is how I actually network all this stuff together. You know, I could see us definitely starting to work closer with Docker, with Docker Data Center. I think customers are going to demand something like that and they're not going to want to host it inside of their data centers. They're going to want to host it in probably a third party service provider. Yeah, I'm sure both of you were looking at, I think it was the Visa case study when you talked about utilization of what they had and I thought of you guys because it was like, oh wait, big surprise, my utilization is really low because wait, why am I doing this in-house when I should be going to somebody to handle that? Your thoughts on the ecosystem? You know, we talked at the Nutanix show, when you look at technology partners, how does the Docker in their ecosystem fit into your thoughts? So it's like a whole new ecosystem to get into, right? So it's kind of discovering from ground zero again what's the ecosystem look like, who's doing what, who's developing what kind of new trends. So it's good to be there early just to get a good feel of the ecosystem, get to know the people and be able to kind of develop a strategy around Docker because it is early days, right? So it's way too early to go into a customer and say we have a complete package for you. That's just not going to happen between now, like six months. So the issue really is how do you get to, you know, a point with a customer where you can jointly develop a strategy to get Docker into your service profile and going to, you know, events like DockerCon really helps to kind of achieve that goal. So you guys are always in an interesting space is you're consuming some of the technologies from the vendor, you've got your customers, you know, putting demands on you. So, you know, CTO strategy, you know, why not dig in for us a little bit as to what you're saying, what's good, what's bad, you know, there's networking, there's storage, there's security, you know, maybe John start with you. I don't know if networking be the one to start but I'll let you choose. Yeah, I think, you know, we're going to run, I mean, we're an infrastructure company. We've been running virtual infrastructure since 2007. We know it, we understand it and you start to understand where the pitfalls are. This is going to change it. I mean, the bin packing problem is going to change significantly over the next few years. Some of the people that I went to their use case sessions, they're saying they're seeing 70% reduction in resources. Now they're not seeing 70% reduction in resources, you know, just because they made things smaller, they just packed them tighter into a smaller group of boxes. That's going to be interesting and you know, discovering how we can actually provide that as a true infrastructure layer for our customers is going to be a really big challenge for us and it's going to revolve around us having pretty strong partner relationships since we don't do the professional services to kind of figure out how to transform your application. We're going to need somebody to help us there. We're going to handle the infrastructure underneath. Maybe explain that a little more. I'm like, you know, if I'm saying, well, if I'm Amazon and you know, I can just do that, they've got kind of infinite resources there and therefore as a customer, I don't need to worry about that. You know, what do you have to worry about and then, you know, should your customers care or will you make that transparent to them? Let's think about the, you know, when we went to virtualization, we had P2V converters, right? We all used them, we all tested them. We said, okay, this physical server now can run as a virtual server. That works. You really don't have, even though they announced something where you can take a VMDK to an image, Docker image, you really don't have a clean way to do that unless you think that building a big monolithic container is going to save you time and money, maybe it will, but there's going to be some sort of application transformation that you have to do to be really successful inside of this new platform in the future and that's something where I think you're going to have to have partners really ingrained to help build the cultural, help build the bridges to the operational teams, help to show the value to the executive team and why you're going to save money, why you're going to do something more secure, how it's going to benefit you in the future and those are just pretty big challenges that are out there in front of us. Youp. Yeah, so that's the major issue, right? So, from our perspective, we use ISVs for the software that we deploy for customers a lot. I'd better say like 90% of the applications we deploy we didn't develop or the customer didn't develop in us. It's just all standardized ISV stuff and having a network of ISVs around you to help you transition from virtual machines into some kind of container format to address a bin packing problem. That's going to be the biggest challenge to solve, right? It's not just packing up an application and moving it into a container, it's actually transforming it from whatever it is now into something more efficient, more scalable, more resilient and that's really the issue we're trying to tackle as far as looking at the ecosystem, looking at how to build our own practice around it. It's not just the infrastructure anymore, it is really all about the application now. So, you have to develop a whole new set of skills, you have to develop new people around you, you have to develop new services. And that's interesting because it does have real advantages for the customers, but it's going to take a while to have that mature to a level where customers actually can put it off the shelf and implement it in their own companies. And one thing I think on the infrastructure side that I just was in Visa's use case, they were talking about how they're doing it on bare metal. That's different for us. We've been running virtualization for so long, now to say to the engineers, hey look, we're actually just going to run a Linux operating system or even a Microsoft operating system now on bare metal and we're going to run containers and get rid of that hypervisor, that's going to be a pretty unique conversation to have. We've already created monitoring tools and performance tools looking all at the VMs. Now we might go back to just running servers again. That'll be a new challenge. Yeah, really interesting. So there's a lot of focus in the keynote about how they've been maturing security. Want to get your take on that? Two years ago, it was like, oh wait, that's one of the biggest barriers to putting things in production. It feels at a high level like we've made some good progress. Is security still an issue? Are you comfortable with where we are? Maybe anything that still needs to be done? You want to go first? Sure. I don't want to talk to you here. This is the can't work. Yeah, so security is always, it's always a can of worms. But my take on it, it doesn't actually matter if it runs in a container or a VM. Like 90% of the threats come from outside the compute, so it's going to come off the network, off the internet, off your users. So really from a security perspective, I'm kind of ambiguous which way to go. But again, the ecosystem story comes back into play. Is the ecosystem mature enough to actually deliver security products for containers? The VMware ecosystem is completely mature in that sense. You can just pick off 20 products and basically do the same thing. And for Docker, that's going to be a challenge to say the least, to get up to a point where you can pick whatever you actually need. It's going to be a discovery and it's going to be a little while before we get there. Yeah. Do I have to read through your tweets to find your answer, John? No, no, I'll give you a full answer. I think well, security is a mess kind of in general, but I think some of the things that they're doing early on that before there's any critical mass adoption yet, making sure encrypted traffic and handling TLS certificates in an easy fashion, that's great. I was impressed with the notary function where you can go and look at the image and know if there's any vulnerabilities and go and identify the problems. It really helps the developers kind of understand the operational ask that people actually have to make sure that, okay, look, you're going to roll out this new image, this new code. Let's make sure it's secure to get started at least. We all know it's going to kind of maybe fall out of the norm once it actually gets up and running operational and production, but let's make sure it's secure at least to boot the thing. What do you see containers have? When does it have a significant impact on your business? Does it transform the way that you deliver your service? Will it change pricing? Yeah, I think it's going to. I mean, a few things that are going to happen. I mean, it's going to increase in scale, so you're going to have more to actually manage, which is going to be a new challenge. That's one side of it, but you're going to probably end up consuming more infrastructure in the long run, and that infrastructure is going to get commoditized even more than it already is right now, and you're going to have to make sure that that's down to the minimum dollars or the minimum cents that you need to provide that very small segment of actual storage or RAM or compute that you need, and that's going to really shift the business, and especially when you look at a lot of containers where, yeah, you have some that maybe run on a monthly basis, a lot of them are going to only be running maybe a few seconds, a few minutes, so you're going to have to have very granular tracking and understanding for that showback chargeback to the CFO that you're actually running the services for so they know exactly what they can expect for the bill that month. That's really different than what we're doing today. Will that be a challenge for you to continue to compete against the public clouds, where it seems that that's a more natural fit for some of the pricing and the models that they've built? I don't think so. I think this is something where you're even getting a more high touch with the application. Data sovereignty that was listed up there, I think on MetLife's use case today, that's always going to be important. They're going to want to know where the data's living, why it's living there, how to audit, how to do compliance against it. That's always going to be really important that's going to make us be a little bit different than the public cloud. You, your business. So I agree, right? So the pricing is going to be something to kind of readjust, but I see a lot of advantages in terms of security, secure software, a supply chain. So I'm really liking that message. So instead of having a big unknown in terms of whatever is coming into your data center, I can say with a certain degree of certainty that the application you are running is secure. It's been tested, it's been tested by the compliance team. And I think enterprises in the end are really looking at how to mitigate those security risks and having such a secure software supply chain is absolutely going to help in that respect. All right, so what feedback would you give to the community? What more do you want to see developed areas where you think we need to make some progress? You know, you can start with you. So that the biggest is monolithic applications. So, you know, a lot of enterprises still have, you know, legacy applications. Oh, you've got Oracle in the Docker store now. Yeah, exactly, but it's still monolith, right? Yeah. So addressing that problem, one way or the other, but especially in terms of availability, recoverability, I think that's one major area where Docker needs to focus on in the coming months. All right, so John, same question with a little twist for you is, you know, what you'd like to see and anything that, you know, if you were talking to VMware, what they should be doing more in this space. Okay, yeah, I think, you know, I want to see from Docker a lot more use cases. I want to see them start to build their user group and community a little bit more. A lot more sharing needs to occur. The use case session that they had, it was basically two days of use cases running were great. A lot of those companies I had a hard time relating to, to my customers. I mean, Visa, MetLife, they're huge. I really don't, I service, you know, small to medium into the large, but they don't have the same use cases. So, you know, continue to focus on, you know, how we can actually, you know, work on this together with these new customers. You know, on the VMware side of it, right? VMware is in every data center in the world. And they have a, you know, a story around Vic. They have a story around Photon. You know, they need to continue to figure out how to build that bridge to, you know, maybe that VMDKE to container tool that they have. Work on it together. See what you can do together to, you know, take this on to the next level and understanding of really how we can actually transform these applications that were all built in VMs. All right, well. John, you really appreciate you guys coming through. You never hold back sharing your opinions on it. I look forward to reading. I'm sure you'll probably do write-ups from the show, too. And we've actually got Visa on as our next guest here. You'll probably give me a couple of questions to ask there, too, when I go into it. But getting towards the end of theCUBE's coverage here, DockerCon 2017, thanks for watching.