 Live from Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Google Cloud Next 17. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Google Next. Here from our Palo Alto studio, happy to welcome to the program a first-time guest, Udi Nakmani, who is the head of Public Cloud at Ubuntu. Udi, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me, pleasure to be here. All right, so I think it goes without saying anybody that kind of understands the landscape. Wait, there's cloud, there's Linux, and especially Ubuntu, that's going to be there. Before we get into some of the pieces, just tell us a little bit about your role there and inside the company. Sure, I've been with Canonical for about three years, and I head up our partnership with the Public Clouds and the public IaaS providers as a whole. That includes Google, AWS, Azure, and many, many others. So can you just clarify one thing for us? You just said Canonical, I introduced you as Ubuntu. Which is it, how should we be referring to these two? Well, we are very well-known for our products, less well-known for our corporate brand, and we're very happy with both names. So I usually introduce myself as Udi from Ubuntu, slash Canonical, so we're used to that. Totally understand. All right, so Public Cloud, give us your view on kind of the landscape today. We want to talk specifically about some of the Google stuff, but what's happening, what are customers coming to you for Public Cloud, where does your suite play into that environment? Sure, I think, so Ubuntu is a very popular OS, and I think probably the most popular, the area where we're most dominant is Public Cloud. So a large majority of workloads on Google Cloud, Azure, the Linux part of Azure, AWS, and many, many other providers is running on Ubuntu. A lot of very high visibility services actually develop on Ubuntu, and we have responsibility in that. We need to make the Ubuntu experience predictable and optimized for that cloud platform and have people trust that experience and believe in it. So that's our job on a technical level, and then on the second level, our job is to really help users access support and tooling on top of that to help them with the operational reality. Because I think what we see, and this you've probably heard this before from Chronicle, what we see is it's great that the licensing cost, the cost of software has gone down. That's great news for everyone. However, what a lot of people don't realize is the cost of operations has gone up, it's skyrocketed, right? It's great that Kubernetes is open source, but how do you actually spin up a cluster? How do you deal with this architecture? What does it mean for your business? So that's where we increasingly focus on private and public cloud. Yeah, it's funny. I did an interview with Brad Anderson a few years ago, and I'm like, customers are complaining about licensing costs, and he starts ranting. He's like, licensing costs, you know that licensing is 6% of the overall cost of what you have. So look, we understand operations are difficult, so why is that such a strong fit? What do you bring, what customers do you serve that they're choosing you in such a large preponderance? I think the two things we do well, one is we're very well embedded in the industry and in the community, and pretty much where people are developing something exciting, they're developing it on Ubuntu, and they're talking to us through the process. So we get a very good view of their problems and challenges as well as our own. And the second thing is we have come up with tools and frameworks to allow a lot of that knowledge to be crowdsourced, right? So a good example is our model operation, modeling platform juju, where you can very easily get from not knowing anything about, for example, Kubernetes, into a position where you have a Kubernetes architecture running on a public cloud like Google, or on another public account, or bare metal, right? So because we tackle that, we assume that somebody's done this before you, somebody's figured this out, take all that knowledge, encapsulate it in what we call a charm, and take that charm and build an architecture on juju, on the canvas, or through the CLI. Okay, maybe could you compare, contrast Google, of course, has some pretty good chops when it comes to Kubernetes. They're really trying to make some of these offerings really as a service, so what does Google do? What do you do? How do they work together? Are you actually partnering there, or are you kind of just in the community both working on things? Right, so Google is in this in two different ways. One is they have their own managed service, GKE, and that's great, and I think people who are all in on Google, and that's probably a good way to go. You get the expertise and you get the things that you need. Our approach, as always, is cloud-neutral and we do believe in a hybrid world. We are members of the CNCF, we're still the sponsor of the CNCF, we're very well embedded in the Kubernetes community, and we do ship a pure upstream Kubernetes distribution that we also sell support for. So we work very closely with Google, in general Google Cloud, on making sure Ubuntu runs well on GCE, and on the other side, we work very closely with the Kubernetes community and that ecosystem to, again, make sure that it becomes very easy to work with that solution. Yeah, Udi, every player that you talk to in the ecosystem gives you a different story when it comes to kind of multi-cloud environments. Google's message tends to be pretty open. I mean, obviously, with what they're doing with Kubernetes and being their position of where they are with kind of customer adoption, they understand that a lot of people that are doing cloud aren't doing it on Google's cloud, so they want to make it, you can live in both worlds and we can support it. I listened to Amazon today, they're like, well, the future's going to be, we're all going to be there, we're going to hire another 100,000 people throughout of all of Amazon and the US in the next 18 months, and Microsoft is trying to wrap their arms around a lot of their applications, IBM and Google are there doing their thing. You've got visibility into customers in all of these environments due to your place in the stack. What are you seeing today? I guess, how is Google's adoption going? Is one question I have for you? And two, most customers, I would think, are running kind of multi-cloud, if you will, is the term. Is that what you see? How many clouds are they doing? What are you seeing kind of shifts in there? And I know I asked you like three different questions there, but maybe you can dig into that and unpack it for us. I think in terms of what they, at least top three clouds are saying, I think it's more important to look at what they're doing. If you think about the AWS and VMware announcement, if you think about Azure Stack for Microsoft, I think those are clearly admissions that there is an on-prem story and there's a hybrid story that they feel they need to address. They might believe in a world where everybody's happy on a public cloud, but they also live in reality. We're at a public cloud show. We're not allowed to admit about on-prem, right? Next you're going to mention OpenStack. Absolutely, no, that's not from me. And then in terms of Google, I think the interesting thing Google is doing, and Google are clearly in that, even in terms of size and growth, I think they're in that top three league, they are, in my impression, is they are focused on building the services and the applications that will attract the users, right? So they don't have this blanket approach of you must use this because this is the best cloud ever. They actually work on making very good, specific solutions, like for big data and for other things. And Kubernetes is a good example that will attract people and get them into that specific part of Google Cloud Platform, and hopefully in the future, using more and more. So I think they have a very interesting, more product-led approach in that sense. Okay, so I think I answered one question. Yeah, you touched on kind of, yes, customers have public and on-prem, so kind of hybrid, if you will, what about public cloud? Most customers have multiple public clouds in your data, or are they tending to get most of it on a single cloud and might having a second one for some other piece? Yeah, I think right now, what we're seeing is a lot of people using perhaps a couple of platforms, right? Especially if they have certain size, I'm putting things like sovereignty and data privacy aside, but just in terms of public cloud users, they might, again, use a specific platform for a specific service. They might use bare-metal servers on software, for example, and VMs on other cloud, right? So people are, by and large, the savvy users do understand that a mix is needed, which also plays to our strength, of course, with tools like Juju and Landscape. We allow you to really solve that operational problem while being really substrate agnostic, right? And you don't have to necessarily worry about getting locked into one or the other. The main thing is you can manage that and you can focus on your app. All right, Udi, what's the kind of top couple of things that customers are coming to you at these shows for? Where do they find themselves engaging with you as opposed to just the developers, they're leveraging what you're doing? Sure, I think, so the one thing that I mentioned before is operations, right? I've heard about big data, I've heard about Kubernetes. What are my options? Do I hire a team? Do I get a consultant? Do I spend six months reading about this? And they're looking for that help, and I think Juju has an open source tool and conjure up as a developer tool that's also open source, really expand their options in that sense and make it much more efficient for them to do that. And the second thing I'd say is Ubuntu is obviously very popular in public cloud, it's popular in production, so production workloads, business critical workloads, and more and more organizations are realizing that they need to think long and hard about what that means in terms of getting the right support for it, in terms of things like security, like an example this week, there's a kernel vulnerability in Linux distros. I don't think it has a name yet, and we have something called the canonical live patch service which patches kernel vulnerabilities, you can guess by the name. Now, people who have that through our support package have not felt the thing through this vulnerability. So I think we start to see more and more of these where people have a lot of machines running on different substrates and they're really worried about their uptime and what a professional support organization can help them do to maintain that uptime. Yeah, it's real interesting times. Being a company involved in open source, involved in open cloud, I want you to react, there was a quote that Vint Cerf gave at the Google event, I was listening, they had a great session, Mark Andreessen and Vint Cerf go there, there was actually room if you got in, but I was glad I got up there and Vint Cerf said, we have to be careful about fast leading to instability. What's your take on that? I hear when I go to a lot of these shows, it's like, wow, yeah, I used to go from 18 months to six months to six weeks from my deployments and public cloud will just update everything automatically, but that speed can, as we were just talking, security is one of the issues, but there's instability, what's your take on that? And how are customers dealing with this increasing pace of change, which is the only constant that we have in our industry? Yeah, that's right, true. I think so from conversational customers I've had recently, I've had a few where they've been sitting around and really deliberating what they need to do with this public cloud thing that they've heard about, and that, you know, trying to buy time eventually might lead to panicking. So a big financial institution that I met maybe a month ago or trying to move all into AWS, right? Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing for them, whether it's the right thing for them, I don't think that discussion was necessarily took place. It may well be the best thing for them, but it's the kind of, it's the kind of, they're rushing into that decision because they took so much time to try and understand. On the other hand, you see a lot of people who are much more savvy and understand that in terms of the rate of change, like you said, it's a constant, so you need to take ownership of your architecture. You can be locked into one box that solves all your problems. You need to make sure you have the operational agility and you're using the right tooling to help you stay nimble when the next big thing comes along or the next little thing, which is sometimes just as scary. And I think that's where, again, that's where we're very well-placed and that's where we can have very interesting conversations. Yeah, really interesting stuff. Actually, I just published a case study with Citi talking about, you know, they use AWS, I would say tactically would be the way to put it. They build, you know, they have a number of locations where they have infrastructure. Speed and agility, absolutely something they need in this outcome. Public Cloud is a tool that they use at certain times, but not, they're things that they were concerned about and how they build their architectures. Want to give you the last word? You know, we see, you know, canonical Ubuntu, a lot of shows you're involved with, a lot of partnerships. What do we expect to see from your cloud group kind of over the next six months? What should we be keeping an eye on? I think, so on the private cloud side, we've been doing some great work into the telco vertical and I think you'll see us expanding into more verticals like financial services, where we've had some good early successes. Can you ask, is that like NFV related? Which was the kind of the top discussion point that I had at OpenStack Summit last year, was around NFV, is it, is that specific? Yeah, that's an element of it. Yeah, but it's about, how do I make my private cloud economically viable as AWS or Google or Azure would be, right? How do I free myself from that and enable myself to move between the substrates without making that trade off? So I think that's on the private cloud side and I think you're going to see more and more crossover between the world of platforms and switches and servers and the world of devices with connected devices. We just finished MWC in Barcelona last week. I think we're in the top 13 or 14 brands in terms of visibility way ahead of most other OS platforms. And I think that's because our message resonates, right? It's great to have five million devices out there but how do you actually ship a security fix? How do you ship an update? How do you ship an app? And how do you commercialize that when you have that kind of size of fleet? So that's a whole different kind of challenge which again, I think with the approach we have to operations I think we are already there in terms of offering the solution. So I think you're going to see a lot of more activity on that front. And in the public cloud, I'd say it's really about continue to work ever closer with the bigger public clouds so that you have optimized experiences on Ubuntu on that public cloud, on your public cloud of choice. And you're going to see a lot more focus on support offerings sold through those clouds which makes a lot of sense. Not everyone wants to buy from another supplier. It's much easier to get all your needs met through one centralized bill. So that's, you're going to see that as well. All right. Udi Nakmani, really appreciate you coming to our studio here to help us with our coverage of Google Next 2017. We'll be wrapping up day one of two days of live coverage here from the SiliconANGLE Media Studio in Palo Alto. You're watching theCUBE.