 Okay, welcome back, I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, it's theCUBE. We go out to the events, I extract the signal from the noise. I'm with my co-host Dave Vellante. We've got a really packed schedule, it's going to try to go through really quickly. I just want to say, what really excites me about theCUBE is we go where the action is. And we're here at the OpenStack Enterprise Forum, talking to all the thought leaders and the people making it happen. And I got to say, Silicon Valley is an amazing place. We were just at the, I was just at the Mac 30th celebration Saturday night, just pure joy, hardware geek, talking old school, and all the activity around open source, open compute, OpenStack really is about innovation. And if the homebrew computer club was around today, they'd be playing in OpenStack, they'd be playing with OpenCompute. So I personally think this is one of the most exciting areas. If it doesn't get screwed up by bureaucracy and payola, if the community can stay strong, OpenStack is totally a winner, that's my vote. I'm bullish on OpenStack, as well as Bitcoin and OpenCompute projects. So we're here with our next guest, Jonathan Brice, Executive Director of OpenStack Foundation. He's here to make it work. Thank you for joining us again. You know, obviously being tongue and cheek on the whole community thing, but that's a balance. So give us the update on the OpenStack Foundation. Where you guys are at, what are the milestones, the conversation here, what's the current state of the union for OpenStack? Yeah, so OpenStack as a project started three and a half years ago. The foundation is a little bit over a year old and that was really, I think, a very big step in kind of the growth and maturity of OpenStack. Finding a long-term, independent, vendor-neutral home for it. And the interesting thing is that we just wrapped up 2013 and we were putting together some basic stats and reports on how OpenStack did in 2013. And key metrics like the number of people who contributed code, the number of people who contribute code every single month, the number of people who have come to our design summits and our conferences and helped us plan out the OpenStack software, the number of companies who are offering products and services, they all doubled or more in 2013. And that's pretty incredible when you think that the base that we were working from was already pretty large. So I think that the state of OpenStack is we're still very much on the upswing, very much in the early days when it's growing really rapidly and there's a lot of opportunity. And I think what that speaks to is just the breadth of what OpenStack is and what it covers. You get a lot of politics now. I mean, obviously you have the big open, the summit coming up and there's very few slots on the keynotes. You guys went to draw the ball from the draft picks. Right, which is, you know, hey, you guys, you got to take an approach. I got to ask you, the balance, I mean, because you got to balance that. You want participation, you want to foster some organic growth and top-down participation. But at the same time, you don't want to have any tainted agendas, right? So how do you handle that? Yeah, I mean, it's a good problem to have in some ways because what it points to is the involvement that we have from so many people. And from our perspective at The Foundation, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to make sure that everybody gets an equal opportunity at everything that we're organizing in the community. And this is something that, like, you know, you brought up how we handle sponsorships at the summit. We have extremely high demand for those sponsorship spots, but our summits are really critical touchpoints for the community as a whole. So it's not about just putting on another industry event. It's about bringing the community together to get a lot of work done. And so we actually limit the number of sponsors that we have there. And it's not about how much you want to pay us. It's not about if you're a big company, small company, Foundation sponsor, that kind of thing. It's really about, you know, we try to make it a very fair process that opens up the opportunity for big companies and small companies to get in there and participate in it. And what's really great is actually, you know, past headline sponsors have been companies like IBM, HP, Red Hat, Rackspace, Canonical. At the summit in Atlanta, one of the headline sponsors is actually going to be Solid Fire. Well, you guys got a lot of transparency too. You got guys like us watching you, and then you get people who care about not getting it screwed up. The old model of, you know, polluting these standards bodies with agendas and quid pro quos and rigged activities. So, but Dave and I always go with the enterprise. Dave, I mean. So Jonathan, I got to ask you, so we were at AWS re-invent and we had Jerry Chen on theCUBE. And we always admonish our listeners. Look, you have to distinguish OpenStack, the project from OpenStack products and solutions. And that's very important. But notwithstanding that caveat, Jerry Chen was on and he was just coming back from Hong Kong. We asked him how it was. And he said, well, let me summarize it this way. OpenStack is sort of all things to all people. AWS is one thing to all people. Is that fair? I think that, again, to my earlier comment, OpenStack is a very broad technology. And this is, you know, somebody had said, what is OpenStack? What is it trying to accomplish in the audience? And my answer at a very high level would be that OpenStack is putting an API on everything that runs in a data center, the compute, the storage, the networking. And it does that in a way that's pluggable. So if you're using commodity servers, if you're using traditional hardware, if you're using OpenCompute, all of those things, there are OpenStack implementations running those. And then you find things like, you know what I was mentioning earlier, where you have a Comcast set top IPTV box that's powered on the back end by an OpenStack cloud, Sony PlayStation on and on. And I think that, you know, if you look at these kind of foundational technologies, over time, they end up being used in far more use cases than were ever imagined at the beginning. You know, I mean, my phone is Android, which is running a Linux kernel. And, you know, Linux powers so many different things. And I think that really OpenStack is not, I wouldn't, I don't, you know, love the term like Linux of the cloud, but I think that it is a very broad technology like that that's meant to kind of put a standard interface on all of the things that have to run in data centers. And that's a really, really valuable proposition. If you think about the additional scale, the additional flexibility, the automation, the results that people like PayPal, eBay are getting by cutting their provisioning times, by standardizing how their development teams can roll out products faster, all of those things really matter to businesses. It makes a big difference in, you know, one of the comments we got from, one of the comments we got from Twitter, from Craig Tracy, was the conversation here is about enterprise, right? So a lot of industry conversation, but the voice of the customer, and he said, he said, quote, again, we keep coming back to the operational aspects of OpenStack. Do we, when do we hear the voices of the operators? And then, you know, someone else comment, oh, they're too busy operating to comment. Operations is a huge deal. I mean, DevOps is kind of what we talk about. So you got the two worlds. Not much conversation on the panel about that. Where are we for operators? Are they feeling like the traction's there? There's a lot of questions from the audience around operational stability, scale, automation. Can you comment on those areas? Well, I mean, you know, the middle panel was all set of people who were running OpenStack and, you know, in production. And the interesting thing is you had a service provider that was running a public cloud based on OpenStack. You had the guys from eBay PayPal who were running a private cloud that powers, you know, a pretty significant percentage of their production environment. And they're running it, you know, from the source code, basically. And then you had Xerox PARC who's running an OpenStack appliance. And so, you know, I think that it shows that there are a lot of different ways to consume it. That's why there are not necessarily easy soundbite answers for some of the questions that people ask. We're early in the process and people, it's an education process still for a lot of those things. But Jonathan, we got to get going. We got on tight timeline. But I do want to ask you one question about the OpenCompute Summit we were live yesterday all day, Dave and I were there yesterday. That's a great open source kind of project for hardware. What's your comments on that? Does that something that you embrace OpenStack community to look at and say, hey, we like that? You know, I did point out, I mean, they're trying to commoditize the server business. Some people call it peanut butter and jelly, OpenStack and OCPs. Do you see it that way? What's your take on it as the executive director? Well, so I think that open technologies are a great thing in every market. And so if you look at what OpenCompute is doing, it's really at the layer below OpenStack. It's at the hardware layer, not just in terms of servers, but actually data center design, cooling, all these kinds of things that really enable you to be able to run operational software like OpenStack and application software on top of that. So it's the whole open from the dirt that the data center's built on all the way up to the data that's coming out of it. I think it's a great thing. And if you look, you know, the Nebula appliance is based off of some OCP designs. IO Cloud is a service provider that just announced this week. They basically have a modularized data center that's OCP plus OpenStack. I think you'll see more of that. I think that's a great trend. It's still early with the OpenCompute project and the foundation, but Microsoft donated some kick, some badass reference designs around there to work in the cloud. So good stuff. We're here at OpenStack for the Enterprise, the OE Forum. OpenStack for the Enterprise Forum. We'll write back this into cubes, exclusive coverage of the OpenStack Enterprise event. We'll be right back.