 Live from Mountain View, California, it's The Cube at OpenStack Silicon Valley, brought to you by headline sponsor, Mirantis. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Frick. Okay, welcome back everyone, we are here live in Silicon Valley, we're all the innovations happening. This is OpenStack SV, hashtag OpenStack SV, go to crowdchat.net slash OpenStack SV, join the conversation. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angle, my co-host Jeff Frick with The Cube. We're here pleased to have a Cube alumni and friend, known Silicon Angle from the beginning, James Waters, storied career, VMware, and now VP of product at Pivotal, or Cloud Foundry Pivotal, I guess Cloud Foundry is an official product, but at Pivotal, part of the Federation. James, welcome back, good to see you. I know you're super busy, thanks for making the time. Yeah, great, great to be here. It was nice to sneak out for an afternoon and catch a little conference time. So, VP of product, that's like the head honcho, I see you speaking with Maritz, you're out there leading the charge, you're out gathering requirements, you're trying to understand the shifting markets, the tectonic plates are happening, earthquakes in Napa, I mean the cloud business is pretty grinding right now, it's a heavy lift. Yeah, I think the interesting thing about my role right now is it's definitely enterprise sales. So we focus on the Fortune 500 primarily, and I spend a lot of time in airplanes, maybe 40, 50% with customers, taking customer meetings, people are using it, people are prospects, and it's just been an interesting tour of the global economy and the global way people use technology of nothing else. It's a very hands on business at the high end. So we were just talking about the cloud evolution, obviously public cloud Amazon's winning across the board, they're lowering prices, increasing functionality, and now you got in the enterprise, they're not born in the cloud like the DevOps that we know, all of our friends are born in the cloud DevOps, Ninjas, but enterprise are born in the data center, born on premise, but now the hybrid cloud is key, so obviously that's your vector. That's it, is we essentially try to take the patterns that you normally find in cloud native applications, but we bring that as an enterprise platform, so we say to them, look you don't have to go out and re-event your platform and discover your tool chain and spend five years inventing it like Google and Facebook did. We'll give you an out of the box enterprise addition of a way to run cloud applications and scale them out, do agile, continuous delivery, things like that. Really hit all of those buttons for an enterprise so that you can faithfully go to a CTO who's running an innovation team and say, this is your net new platform, you can go build out your next generation of applications on and get a radically different economics of running them and deploying them. So the public cloud is a different animal, compare and contrast with the folks out there who are trying to grok cloud foundry, because you have a lot of biz dev deals you've done with IBM, BlueMix, others. There's a biz dev, land and expand, get the relationships, get more goodness flowing, but what's the differentiation between public and I don't want to say private, but hybrid cloud, essentially is the private cloud. If you think about Amazon is, who is Amazon hurting? I think Amazon hurts, frankly, companies like Dell, like if you imagine Dell used to be, hey, I'm going to go to a website, I'm going to order my own server and they'll ship it to me, right? That's Amazon now, right? You go to Amazon, you make a couple of web services calls and you've got it. So they've really disrupted that server distribution market very effectively and I think to a large extent that's changed even the way software adapts above that layer. We think about what platforms of service and platforms disrupt, it's much more about Oracle and Oracle's middleware stack, like what am I going to write applications to? How am I going to think about my application container? How am I going to think about failover? How am I going to do service discovery? How am I going to do scale out of my applications? How do I think about that architecture? So we're much more disruptive and it's a little bit longer term play against companies like Oracle that have been selling that application middleware. So Red Hat was just on talking about, I said is Cloud Foundry trying to boil the ocean over which we know is a tech vernacular for ticking on too much, some say no, some say no and Tim Crawford said, if she actually didn't say you were boiling over, I said that, that was my words. And she said they're not boiling over anything and then Tim said if Cloud Foundry is boiling the ocean, could the same be said for Red Hat? And then she said you're duct taping Bosch together. Is that a fair assessment, building around that? And what is your focus? I mean, Cloud Foundry is pretty much everywhere. You're doing a lot of partnerships. We're having a huge first year in the enterprise and selling it. I mean, I think the reason so many competitors are obsessed with us and when I walk around right now I kind of get looks and like, hey, what's going on with these guys? It's because we're popping up in a lot of accounts. If you think about the relationships that VMware and EMC have, the level of trust they have in bringing out new products and new architectures, they're able to really look at CTO and the I and say, with the Federation, we're going to take you on this cloud journey through a whole application portfolio. And that's really powerful. And you guys not held back on any, you're not like quiet when it comes to marketing. You're out marketing heavily. We are here to win and we're winning as the way I describe it. And what Cloud Foundry does that's so compelling some people might say ambitious, but it's why it's been fun to work on for me for four years now. This month is my four year anniversary of working on the product, which is unbelievable for me to think about that. How old I am. Is that when you install us, we use cloud APIs. So that's why I'm here at OpenStack Conference. We use the APIs to completely set up the platform and scale the platform. So we don't say, hey, if you want to install Cloud Foundry, come along with some puppeter, some chef or some of your homemade scripts and install it yourself, good luck. We're like, look, we now know that we can procure that server with an API call. So let's take advantage of that and set ourselves up completely. What about Mesosphere and what they're doing? Flow, yeah. Flow is on early, awesome guy. Yeah, I saw Flow here for the first time maybe two years ago, giving a cool talk about what he was up to at Airbnb. And I've talked with him about collaborating and I think there might be some future there. If you think about what they're doing, they're more disruptive to something like OpenStack because they're saying, why would you think of the worlds in terms of virtual machines representations? You can think of it in terms of pure processes that you schedule across any number of different containers. So I think it'll be interesting to see how OpenStack versus Mesosphere plays out kind of as a scheduling war. So obviously Docker's financing is pretty huge news. It's pretty much leaked out earlier. 40 million, they haven't been around for a year with funding. Dot Cloud got kind of spun off. They're all in on the container. What's your take on that? What's the hype? Obviously developers are loving it and your relationship with Docker and... We're really thrilled about it. Docker's a member of the Cloud Foundry Foundation and Cloud Foundry runs applications and it gives us a whole other unit of currency when you start expressing those applications as Docker files in addition to just War files. So before you gave us a Ruby app and we ran it but now you could actually specify everything about that Ruby app in terms of the packaging of it and the runtime context and push that as a Docker image. And we did this pretty cool demo called Diego. It's a new component called Diego. We did a great demo of it where we push a Docker image. We scale it up to 300 instances running, all load balance to all health managed with logging coming out. So we can do really impressive things now both with applications or Docker images. And I would really say that Docker is much more like GitHub as a company in terms of enabling that developer workflow than they are like VMware. And I think a lot of people confuse them for the next VMware when they're much closer in heart to that developer workflow like GitHub is. We're a little bit higher up in the stack in terms of applications VMware might be lower under the hood. Right, people think that Docker's just about the container but it's really about that workflow of how do you get an image into the container? In fact, when Docker started it was just using LXC which is the generic Linux container we'd always had. The thing about Docker is amazing. They crack the code on the developer flywheel and also the bent with a little nuance on how developer communities are insented but also they're great for stateless applications. VMware can win on stateful applications. So talking to Pat Gelsinger and also Bill Fathers and I'm like, dude, is this a little secret? Am I opening up like the secret play here? They're like, aww. But if you think about it, that's what enterprise is. A lot of stateful applications. Docker is phenomenal for stateless. Yeah, I mean, and that's why we use it. We use it as a stateless application within Cloud Foundry. That's what it does well for us and we wrap services around it. But if you think about the billions and billions of dollars have been invested in storage and networking around the virtual machine paradigm, it's non-trivial. So I think that's where the container community is just getting started is starting to think about how they're going to do storage and networking in a really robust enterprise grade way. And I think that'll be a long mission for them. There was a great tweet by a guy who's an engineer at Heroku who said, the only thing that Heroku's taught me is the incredible difference for a stateless container system and a stateful container system because they've got Heroku apps and they've got Heroku Postgres. So they've got some mileage on containers. Well, I mean, if the API economy plays out, which it will, that's obvious, that trajectory is, unless there's some force major, something happens that's weird, it's going to come home. It's going to happen. That's good for apps. Because then now that becomes the key interoperability between the data and apps. And then let other stuff under the hood happen. I get that. So I want to ask you with that as a kind of lead in, we've been talking for now almost six years, we've known each other or more. 2008. The platform as a service was a huge battleground. It was a wrestling match because everyone was trying to say, okay, Amazon's got infrastructure as a service, but now pass doesn't seem to be as competitive. It seems to be a nice little coexistence going on. I mean, it's competitive. No, I mean, I wrote a blog just last week. And I think the venture capitalists took a false positive when Heroku was acquired and just started pouring money into these public pass companies that were Heroku-like. And if you look, those companies were CloudBees, DotCloud, AppFog, StackMob, Parse. And all of those companies now pivoted to offer another smaller tool. In the case of DotCloud, it's now Docker. And they offered a much smaller, simpler tool that is compatible with CloudFoundry. We just announced CloudBees. They're going to become a Jenkins service for CloudFoundry. So you either went really big and developed a huge ecosystem the way we tried to play it. Or you had to become kind of a niche smaller offering and pivot to something smaller and more contained. Well, it really came down to, if you can correct me if I'm wrong, if you want to go in and own the stack, you had to be really aggressive and own it, or you dance around the stack. So what you're saying is these companies realize, hey, I don't want to fight that battle. I'll get behind player X and I'll play in that. It's really similar to what happened with OpenStack versus Eucalyptus versus Nimbula versus, remember there were 10 companies that competed with OpenStack? And now it's pretty much just OpenStack, right? Well, those companies now are three years into their funding. You meant we were talking before we get on. Some other companies that are billing for two years. Some of these might not play out. I mean, some of these might not make it so the word pivot will be around for more consolidation for those companies. But also the movement Eucalyptus to HP is a big signal. And recently the CloudStack is going on its final chapter. So everything's happening within the OpenStack, right? So do you see anything different from that picture? I think the thing about platforms of service is in that layer you have to have huge money for R&D to really build the whole stack that people need. And then you need huge money for go-to-market and sales because it's an enterprise product. So if you try to build a company without both of those you could be in pretty big trouble. So we think it's a big boys game. And the same way, frankly, that Google and Amazon building infrastructure is a big boys game, right? You know, there's a lot of startups. Google's rolling into town now. Yeah, absolutely. And they're here to disrupt Amazon. It's one of the most interesting things to watch for me actually is. Kubernetes was a very interesting discussion. What's your take on that? Yeah, what did you, I mean, it's an interesting thing because Craig and the Kubernetes team is really trying to bring container-based systems to the world, just like Google's run for years. So I think what they did was smart in the same way that we did it before at VMware is we offered an open source standard around our way of doing things. But we invited the community to contribute and share in it. That's something that Amazon hasn't done well. Like if you think like DynamoDB, they don't have an open source version of DynamoDB where they invited community around it. I think Amazon could really, really potentially set them themselves up to be a Microsoft-like monoculture over time. And that's interesting to think about that Seattle DNA and the inability to share. Well, both firms are not here at this event. Right, like Azure and AWS. I think if you do not have an open source aspect to your product and you really want to cater to developers and develop infrastructure standards, it's a higher risk mission over time. James Waters here inside theCUBE, VP of product, been fun to watch your career. This is your swan song right now, is the Cloud Foundry. You're all in on Cloud Foundry, right? Are you all in? Four years in, all in, and it couldn't be a better year for me. We're going to talk to HP here in theCUBE. They're all in as well on OpenStack. Congratulations on all your success. It's fun to watch you really take your original vision. We talked about early days and make it a reality, a pivotal, and congratulations, good luck. And keep us updated on all the events. James Waters, VP of products and marketing and ecosystem for Cloud Foundry, here inside theCUBE, we'll be right back live in Silicon Valley. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Jeff Frick. We'll be right back.