 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE at IBM Interconnect 2015. Brought to you by headline sponsor, IBM. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in Las Vegas, the Mandalay Bay for IBM's Interconnect. This is theCUBE's special presentation. This is our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signature of the founder of SiliconANGLE. Join Dave Vellante, founder of Wikibon.org. Our next guest is Simon Cahey, who is the link and DevOps Web ID Tech at IBM. He's a geek. In the developer community, welcome to theCUBE. Actually, we've learned that some of the other IBM events that we shouldn't be saying geek or nerd or no. But basically developers, it's a developer tsunami right now. If you've been in the cloud for the past decade, there's been great goodness around with open source. Now enterprises are seeing the love and the action and the opportunity. Give us an update. Blue Mix is new to the park. Cloud perspective, Cloud Foundry component. It's all done out in the open. And you guys are developing as fast as you can. Talk about what you're working on and what's the hot, hot thing right here for you. So what we're working on and what I'm working on in particular is how are we going to make developers successful? Bringing their applications to Blue Mix. So in particular, right now, if you look at all of the cloud space, what you'll find is that people are primarily using cloud as a target, a deployment target for their application. And so what we're working on is making it available for developers to directly build their application in the cloud without having to do an additional step where they're doing local development. It's a big challenge for developers right now. Obviously developers are fickle. They want reliability. They don't want, they want to have ease of use. They have also shown that infrastructure is code. That direction is totally viable. But you got open source, which is a collaborative model. Workforce all over the place. So GitHub's done great, sharing code. That's now the standard. How does that relate to what's going on in real time in the cloud for developers? Developers are a fickle bunch. I think it's, I think the space has changed in the last sort of 10 years. 10 years ago you found everyone going using an IDE like Eclipse and they'd spend their whole day there. With the cloud and the web certainly. What I found is that developers are now using a bunch of different tools. I think what developers are, this is hard to do. You're using a bunch of different tools. So they're looking for ways to simplify their workflows, to automate everything that they're doing so that they can build their applications as quickly as possible, debug their applications, all the sorts of things that are part of the developer life cycle when creating. So I got to ask you the question because this is all we talk about with developers. Because it's like a new way, an old way, and then once you're on the bandwagon, there's a little bit of a hipster kind of developer faction where it's like, okay, I'm used to this. This is the DevOps model. Everyone's embracing DevOps. So seeing a polarization of a couple concepts. Mistakes mean things you have to have minimum. Right. And there's opportunities. Live Sync is one of those things we were talking about before. You're working on. So breakdown, what's the table stakes that has to be in place to be truly devout with BlueMix? And what innovations? Is Live Sync part of the table stakes? Is it both innovation piece? And because I want to see everything that I've had before, and I want to make my life easier, reduce the steps that takes the do stuff and not go and be cool, or whatever. So the way I see it is that, yeah, the table stakes are shifting very, very quickly. A lot of the cloud stuff is very new. Really, it was around three or four years ago, but the quality really wasn't there. So I think one of the table stakes that's coming along very, very rapidly and important developers is the quality has to be there. The quality of your fabric has to be excellent. And I think is your initial table stakes. But foundational meaning from a foundation. Now, my concern is primarily the tools. So I think that your tools have to make it so that you're seeing the truth of what your application is doing in the fabric. Is it started, is it stopped, is it pitting the CPU, all of those sorts of things. And so I think that's your base level. But where I think we go a little bit further is that you can run your app in production, but you still can't effectively develop your app in a production cloud environment. You still have this huge cycle where you have to compile all your code and then sort of hope to the best. And so people end up having to set up a production environment, a QA environment, a development environment, and that all makes sense. But really, I think Live Sync is beginning, Live Sync is what we have in Bluemix. There's other similar plays going on in the industry. And the real advantage here is it lets you understand what your application is actually gonna be doing when running in the cloud environment. And there's a set up involved around your service. In some cases you won't have services that you can easily replicate in a local environment. Like, can you imagine trying to replicate my local Watson or something like that? So, you know, increasingly I think that the table stakes are going to be that, as a developer, I don't want to have anything on my desktop or I just want to run everything in your cloud environment and that's going to be the new game. And what about the, what's the attitude to a tool? I mean, are developers, are they glomming on to sort of their tools? Or do they want to be agnostic? Can you make a tool with tooling agnostic? So, I love too much. The first thing is, is that you have to let the developers use whatever tools they want to use. And what I said is how 10 years ago, everyone was using web IDs, sorry, not web IDs. Desktop IDs, like Eclipse and Visuals. But changed. You know, if you, five years ago, what people were using, they were using a automated editor. Now, they're all using sublime text. And what are they doing for their source control to integrate, they're using command line tools like Git. Instead of everything being integrated into an ID. So, I think that we're at this sort of this funny point where developers are grabbing whatever they can to get their job done. And so, the change I see as a person who develops tools is that I think that we're going to, the pendulum's going to swing back and we're going to start to see a lot of these tools be more tightly integrated into a single cohesive tool that developers be really productive. So, a lot of those, if I'm not mistaken, a lot of the bespoke tools that we see today will be sort of invisible or? No, so, that may be a long term view. I think for right now though, we have to support everyone. And we have to make sure that everyone is going to be successful. I might say direction, but the reality is is that developers are using Vi and Emacs and there's been more sophisticated alternatives for a long time. So, I don't imagine that's going to change. You really have to bring your cloud development environment to the developers. So, let them use whatever tools they want. But, as a trend, what I say is these things are going to become increasingly because it's a pain right now. Just get a little action on Twitter. I was just looking at the screen and the tooling thing comes up a lot. So, that's really, you hit a nerve there. And the whole fabric. And all of these are so sensitive about tools. Here's a really silly example. A dark thing for a light theme. And developers are extraordinarily passionate about that and you'll find that it's about 50. The amount of time you spend tweaking hotkeys and fonts, it's unbelievable. Developers really want that customized tool that exactly suits what they're wanting to do. All right, so we know how developers think. They're crazy. Crazy is what creates innovation. But no, they have to because the tooling's everything. Well, let's take it to the next level. Explain the sync product, LiveSync. Because now we're getting into the complicated. We know developers are like that. They like their things neat and their tools the way they like them. Their hammers and all the stuff that they build with. But now when you bring a cloud in it, you have a build model of local host pumps into the cloud environment. Someone's orchestrating it. Whatever the process is. But now with DevOps, it's actually infrastructure as code. There's now this new middle ground that you guys are attacking with LiveSync. Right. Can you explain? These are the Amazon. Do they have it? Do they don't have it? This is a really cool thing. I want to just expand that one. Sure, so as far as I know, no, Amazon. Amazon doesn't have this. Let me explain what it does. A developer is in their code editor and they have the application. What LiveSync gives them the capability of doing it. Every time they save a change in their code editor, the application is updated. Now, right now our support is for Node.js applications where you don't necessarily have a compilation step. But going forward, one of the ideas is to as you make a change incrementally, compile the code and figure out the best way to put that into the running environment. So, I mean, there's similar offerings where you're effectively mounting your developer base directly in your running application. But this is really a little bit different. The idea of LiveSync is to put this in the flow of everything that's involved in getting your code from the developer who's making the change through potentially through a compilation step, a minification step, a transpilation. There's a zillion transforms here and directly into your running application. Full-life cycle is really what we're talking about. And how was that managed? How do you get visibility into that? So, and what are the metrics around that? Well, first off, everything we do in the Web ID, we've got metrics. We've got a good idea of what the user's doing. And likewise, there's a command line client for Bluemix Live as well. And we know, so we know how frequently, for example, a developer is saving, how frequently they're making changes, how frequently that might result in leaving an incomplete file, something that isn't going to be valid JavaScript or valid HTML. But apart from that, I mean, the way to think about this is we're trying to replicate the developer's experience on the local desktop. So there aren't actually a ton of analytics around exactly what the developer's doing, because probably, because that's not the point. We're just trying to move the developer from their app to developing it into the cloud. And so that's more what we're measuring. So the metric is happy, productive developer? Yes, happy, productive developer. Was the developer able to take that the regular sample and a meeting up and running in the cloud? Were they able to take a sophisticated, a larger sophisticated application and hit the deploy to Bluemix button and have a fully created development environment where they can begin to hack and make changes and see what the app is just cloned is all of it. You know, we always like to talk about fashion in tech. What's fashionable? What's the new suit, if you will, the new flavored wine that the developers love? Is it Erlang? You mentioned some of the languages. I mean, the favorites pop up. Some are trending. Some are relevant. Could you just share, just for the folks who aren't inside the ropes? Sure. Well, I mean, obviously, so I work on the JavaScript standard. So I think JavaScript, it's come a long way, but other languages. And Node is doing well. Node is doing well, and with the Node Foundation, that's a huge step forward. It alleviates a lot of the concerns of some of the larger companies like IBM, Microsoft might have about using Node. Other languages, I'm a polyglot. I love languages. I quite like Go. I see Go being used a lot in places like Docker and certainly Cloud. Java is still huge. And Node has brought it to the server side, so that's changed the game a bit on the real-time side. And Redis, Docker, these have emerged as awesome new things for Cloud. So I think, so right now, everything we're doing is for Live Sync is for Cloud Foundry, but that's going to shift into the Docker space. Currently, developers are creating these little mini sandboxes on their local machine using Vagrant and Docker. And so what I see going forward is we've got to figure out the same thing in a Cloud environment if we want to make our Lumix developers successful. So what is the mindset of the developer? Because when you get to the front lines, developers have to be close to the customers, which back in my day, they keep the developers away from the customer. Now you're getting close to the customer. Design's a big part of it, but also virtualization is a lot of good stuff going on in virtualization that's changing the game. Could you take us through the current state of the developer mindset that's relevant around how they view these things? Do they not care about virtualization or do they care about it? Do they care about them? I mean, obviously customers have more affinity towards customer interactions. Can you share kind of how that's evolving? So I can't directly to the customer, but I can tell you talk to you about the developer mindset around virtualization. I've been developing software for a long time and I used to always do everything on my local disk. And then I started to have to deploy my application into an environment that really was less and less like what I was running on my local disk. And that's when things like virtual box, vagrant, they came in and vSphere came in and became important because I could then create a virtual environment similar to what my production was. The problem with that is it was ridiculously heavyweight and if I was developing more than just a single server, it became a real pain. And then tools like vagrant came along and Docker, like I think Docker was an old, suddenly became hot. And timing was pretty critical, right? Timing is always critical. And how they tweak the old, too. How they use open source by having that contribution recycle in, right? That means everything, as they say, right? I mean, amazing what has happened. Yeah, I mean, Docker came from nowhere to like, huge. Same thing with Node, nowhere. Like, Ryan, did Ryan really see that this was going to be something that was going to be? He's one of our most all time, cute views of all time, Ryan, Ryan Dahl. You know, he's the rock star. So, I mean, yeah, it's pretty incredible. And it kind of, but it's attached to the, you know, Jeff Jones term, the observation space, the bigger space of developers now that are, you know, can play in that field. Simplification is really exciting from a developer standpoint. I mean, yes or no, right? Some of the old schools like, well, back when the day, but think about the innovations that are occurring. This is awesome. Like I can remember Java web apps, long time to install things like a server and all that sort of crap. Wasted time. And now it's like, go get the Docker image. Bang, you're done. So I just see more, there'll be something, like the next Docker that's going to come along. And I just, I bet it's adoption cycle will be even faster than what we saw with Docker. Why do these things happen? I mean, we always speculate. We want to get your opinion more. Let's share mine. Tate, we say it all the time. Why bring up? I mean, like grow like a weed. I'll say it, because they save time. They save time. Why did Docker become so fast so quickly? Because it saves time and it saves resources. When, if you were running virtual box on your machine, these things were heavyweight. You could only run three or four on a really big server. Now with Docker, you can run a ton of these things. And so it just saves you time, saves you resources. You know, it lets you get up and running and coding faster, changes, have them reflected in your production environment quicker. So that's why these things... So the question I always ask the Bluemix guys that we talk to our engineers on, because we're on Amazon heavily is, why Bluemix? Convince me to go first. Most people are like, well, no, I'm comfortable with Amazon. I'm talking about Bluemix. It's kind of new, you know, Pivotal's involved. There's all this kind of webbing going on. Bottom line is I don't want to get screwed. That's kind of a psycho, I'm paraphrasing, honestly, no one says that. But that's kind of a mindset of a developer because that's what the way they think. Right, so I mean. What's the comfort blanket that you guys can offer them? A little blanky or, but... Well, I mean, what I can say is the way IBM works with these first off Cloud Foundry and work with Docker, we're working directly with them. We're not just using it and saying, isn't it great? We're actually right in there. Get some chops behind it. You guys are putting some energy in it. You bet. And a lot of energy, a lot of... And the reason that's important is that we can go in and then get the changes that we want that make sense for our customers in that environment. So I think that's a huge advantage. Great lift, too, rising top of all boats in that open core, kind of open source model, right? The other thing is that Bluemix is not one thing. It's not Cloud Foundry. It's not Docker. It's, I think, an ideal. I can't, actually, I don't work directly with it, with the Faber team, but I don't think of Bluemix as just, I think of it as the IBM Cloud. It's IBM's version with a little bit of stuff from the cores, right? Things will come and go and... Well, the thing people don't know about what we'll share here is, I mean, Cloud Foundry is an open source initiative that are foundations independent. So there was, they started with the Cloud Foundry, which was people kind of like, but what happened was, Almarit's gathered folks around IBM, one of them, and said we're going to create this foundation of governance that's proven. And that was the stability that was needed. Since then, it's been explosive. That's right. So we have our guys go and work directly with the folk from Pivotal, and it's, you know, we pair with them and they pair with us, and it's not, it's not, we actually are very, very in an interleaved fashion with... Change the two for that, I think. Okay, final question. What's next? What are people not talking about that they should be talking about from a developer standpoint? The house is being thrown around by the big guys. You know, the mantras, ship with code, lead with code is still open source paradigm. What should people be looking at? I'd not be paying attention to this, it's not that sexy, or might not be written about on the blogs or whatnot. I mean, I'm on the same point again. The big change that we're going to see in the next year or two is the developers are going to stop doing their development locally. They're going to do all of their work in the cloud. You know, just at home, for example, my wife, if I install Docker and Vagan and all that crap on my machine at home, she'll freak out. I need to put that on additional machines and that's a hassle, I have to manage that. So, the big, big change that we're going to see in the next year or two is the developers are going to move all of their development off their local machine out into the cloud. Simon, K.E., thanks for joining us on theCUBE from a developer perspective. Great insight, great to see you. Bring that historical perspective on what's on the mind of developers. Here at the IBM show in Mandalay Bay, this is theCUBE, we'll be right back with more signal and data to share. Here, we're open source media. We love open source. We are media developers, Dave. We'd love to pump out that content and share with you. It's open, it's free, no wall guard, and go to siliconangle.tv. Go to interconnect go for a new digital experience, a new experiment that's going on, all the trending items, all the VIP influence, all the data's there. Great experience, look at the live streams. We're part of that. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back after this short break.