 sponsors, Red Hat and Cisco. Now here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and Brian Graceley. Welcome back to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's flagship program. We go out to all the shows, help extract the signal from the noise. This is OpenStack Summit 2016, the North American show here in Austin, Texas. I'm Stu Miniman joined by Brian Graceley and we have a light minute ad to the program. Happy to have on Bashir Abdi, sorry, who's the principal software engineering manager at Microsoft. Bashir, can you tell us a little bit about your role at Microsoft, what brings you and the Microsoft team to OpenStack? Sure, so very few people know about this, but basically Microsoft has a pretty large footprint in OpenStack. We have the integration drivers for all, ranging from Nova, Neutron, Cender, what is it, you name it and we are integrated there. And to test all of that, we verify these integrations in our own integration, continuous integration lab, which is at Cambridge, Massachusetts and we are actually building another one in Redmond Ridge, in Redmond as well. For our development site where we develop these integration drivers, we actually use cloud-based solutions, which I'm sure you'll have a chance to talk to as well. They actually are our open-stack proxies, development proxies, so they help us develop the integration drivers in coordination with us and we verify that work and we do it in a completely transparent manner and we actually basically are, believe it or not, very few people might know about this. We are right now in the top three, we are always in the top three contributing CIs in open-stack. Can you explain because, I mean, most people think open-stack, they think Linux. So, where is this Azure integration in the public cloud? Is it into the stack that goes on from, what integrations on the Microsoft side, what products are you integrating with? So on the Microsoft side, our integration is primarily focused on Hyper-V and the Windows technologies. We view open-stack as, of course, it's a great API and it provides opportunities in a very transparent community context. We like to put the, for example, the Hyper-V in the Nova socket. We use Windows technologies for Cinder and Neutron and we work, as I said, very closely with Cloudbase to make sure that we are present in almost all the major integration points in open-stack. So that's where the emphasis on our integration is. Yeah, so it's an interesting time. A couple of weeks ago at the Build conference, we saw essentially the Bash shell and Ubuntu integrated into Windows, which is, you never would have seen this five years ago, 10 years ago. I know. Talk a little bit about the big culture change that's going on at Microsoft in terms of adopting open-source. What do you hear from your customers about their interest in open-source and kind of how the two of those things blend together? Microsoft's interest in contributing and your customer's interest in using the technology. So what I would like to say is that this has been going on for quite a while and it's very unfortunate that a lot more people don't know about it. So I joined Microsoft in around late 2007 and I was hired out of Cambridge, Massachusetts to help us with our Linux integration services, which I'm sure a lot of people must have heard about. It actually makes Linux a completely equal citizen on Hyper-V. You know, all the features that are available for Windows guests are now available to all the Linux guests as well. And in fact, these drivers are part of the Linux kernel. So I'm very proud of my contribution there. And this started a long time ago. We have all heard about the new Microsoft and I realized that there might be a little bit of cynicism around that. But it really is a new Microsoft. When it comes to reaching out, making partnerships with open-source companies. You just mentioned Ubuntu running on the bash. There are a lot more activities going on. For example, it's public knowledge that Linux is about 25% of our IAS workload on Azure. And it's not just plain Linux IAS that is running there. We have Hadoop, we have, you name it, we have that. Yeah, big partnership with Red Hat just got announced six months ago. So things are happening and things are happening in a big way at Microsoft around open-source. And I look forward to being a part of this and maybe next year or next summit at Barcelona and we'll have some more good news to share with you. Yeah, okay. So Heshear, Microsoft, one thing that we've said that Microsoft is really good at is when you hear about the hybrid story for most, it's like, well, I do a little bit of here and maybe I do this, but I don't really want it. Microsoft, of course, has a huge presence in everybody's data centers. I mean, you look at any VMware environment that are running Microsoft apps and Microsoft operating systems, the Azure stack on-prem that's building out. And you've got your public cloud, you've got softwares of service. What do you think, from the inside, do you guys think about hybrid cloud? Do you just have your services and they live everywhere? How does that dynamic play out? So being a Microsoft employee and having worked on this technology for a while, the hybrid cloud is, of course, completely understand looking at this morning's keynote summit, for example. A lot of it was around the hybrid cloud and everybody knows that we are working on our own technologies around that, but it is not just limited to Azure stack, for example. And hence, we are at this summit. So we are right now in the phase where we are developing the integration drivers for OpenStack, but for example, hey, if it turns into a community context that folks want to migrate, as I think it might happen down the road, they want to migrate workloads from OpenStack to Azure, then our public cloud and our development resources are there and we look forward to working with the community on any source of, any sort of cloud bursting or anything to Azure. Right now we are at that stage where we are more focused on the CI side of things and the buttressing up our integration, but down the road, I don't see any reason why OpenStack workloads could not be cloud bursting to Azure. Sure. Yeah, and I think what we see is, part of the keynote today was Boris and Miranda said, look, 90% of the challenges with clouds is the people in process side. We look at what Microsoft is announcing that the investments they're making, they really are about technologies that you're interested in. So it could be Docker, it could be Mesos, it could be something about big data and analytics, but it's starting out in a place where the operations is built in for you. It's in the Azure cloud, it lets you get started and then there's sort of, it feels like it's going in the opposite direction of like then if you want to sort of bring it back in-house. So it feels like you guys are addressing that part of the people in process. You're going to use your expertise and then give you whatever technology that's interesting. If it's Windows, great, if it's Linux, if it's some other thing, that feels like a very interesting, refreshing sort of way of looking at things. So just to add to that a little bit, my background is primarily in startups. And then I said, well, this opportunity from Microsoft looked very interesting in 2007, so I joined up. And my friends and everybody was really surprised. Well, most of the software that I used before I joined Microsoft was open source. And I mentioned that during my interview at Microsoft and they said, well, that's precisely why we would like you to join up and help us. And I'm just one little cog in the wheel, as they say. So there are hundreds of, I would say thousands of people who are looking at and getting involved in the open source side of things. And what I can also tell you is that, you mentioned a few technologies that are available on Azure open source-wise. But if you, for example, want to get their programs in existence, where if you are an open source vendor and you want certification by Microsoft, you can certainly go ahead and do that. So these are things that, one of the reasons I'm taking this interview is because I want to get the word out. I would love to get the community involved here. Right? Yeah, so essentially, I found a great, there's actually a website, it's like microsoft.com slash openness, which goes through all the pieces. So people want to find out more about what Microsoft's doing in open source in general and open stack specifically. What are some of the resources? Where do they go? How do they find that? So if they want to specifically find out about our integration with OpenStack, there is an email alias actually, it's called OpenStack at microsoft.com. So it's manned by our team. And if you want to ask any question about OpenStack and Microsoft integration, I look forward to hearing from you at OpenStack at microsoft.com. You know, there's my email, of course, that will be shared, I believe, in this broadcast. I would be more than happy to answer any questions. You can also reach out to cloud-based solutions. They will be at the marketplace tomorrow. And tonight, of course, for any questions, generally you'll find the Microsoft team sitting by there. So we will do our level best to answer any queries that you might have there. That's great, that's great. It's great that you guys are embracing the community that you want to be open about that. Absolutely. That's what this whole week is about. It's, you know, grow the community. It's like Jonathan said, hey, if you find somebody interesting, go meet them, go start talking to them, see what work you can learn, what you can collaborate around. So that's fantastic. Absolutely. So, great. Well, Ashira, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate getting Microsoft viewpoint here, what's happening with OpenStack and the open source community. We'll be right back with lots more coverage here. Thank you. OpenStack Summit 2016 here in Austin. It's always fun to come back to theCUBE