 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 live in Silicon Valley for OpenStack SV. This is The Cube. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Jeff Frick. The Cube in Silicon Valley is kicking off this September, our operations. We're going to go out to all the events around Silicon Valley, all the most important events. Talk to the tech athletes, the leaders, really the leaders innovation, and it's not just going to be the big events, but it's also going to be the little events, little OpenStack meetups. These are the important opportunities for us and we're certainly excited to be at the, it's now a big event, OpenStack SV, which grew out of just sheer demand for OpenStack conversations and thought leadership and information. Also, OpenStack has a big event coming up in Paris. And so, I mean, that's just a few months away and there's still a huge demand. Our next guest is Jonathan Bryce, executive director of OpenStack Foundation. Jonathan, welcome back to The Cube. Yes, thank you for having me. So, I mean, December is right around the corner, you've got OpenStack Paris, why wait? Just boom, Silicon Valley's hot and heavy for OpenStack. It's in November, yeah. I guess less than two months now, we're going to be having probably about 3,500 people join us in Paris for the next OpenStack summit. And that is, it's really the, it's a week of all things OpenStack. And this is a great preview and a great opportunity to connect with a lot of the people that we're going to see over there and hear some advanced product news and various things that people are already working on. Just to clarify, I mentioned December, you mentioned November, the dates are the third fourth, third through the seventh of November. Yes, exactly. So, make sure we get the dates right. So, obviously Paris, everyone makes a trip across the pond, certainly here on the East Coast, it's nice hot, but for California, some people might not make it. So, Silicon Valley kind of fills the void here on the West Coast. Give us the update, okay? Obviously, we heard from Miranda, the CEO, asking Martin some tough questions around kind of what's working, what's not working. What's your take on the State of the Union of OpenStack? Well, I think that the thing that's been the most exciting for me in the last six to nine months is the new users who have been coming out and talking about what they're doing with OpenStack and also kind of organizing themselves into a really strong and active user community. You know, when OpenStack started, it was all developers and then we had a lot of companies that came in to start building products and services and now we have the users coming in and it's really, I think, the piece that's extremely critical to keep us focused in the right direction and there's nothing like a user to just kind of say the obvious thing and tell you like, oh, duh, yes, we're not doing the right thing here or tell you, yes, this is great, we're on the right path. So conflict and crisis creates opportunity. What are some of the things that you guys have gone through this past year? Because when you have the momentum, you guys certainly have momentum, the demand is high. This puts more pressure on the community, to one, coexist, but also have, you know, food fights that are good and productive but not distracting. So can you comment on some dynamics that have changed or it's happening this year? Yeah, I mean, I think that the challenge that we continue to face even now four years in is just how quickly it continues to grow. And if you look at even just from a practical standpoint of accepting the code contributions, that is something that we've built a lot of innovation, a lot of systems around, but those continue to get stretched and pushed in different directions. And so that I would say is really the biggest challenge that we continue to face. And along with that, you have kind of how do you make an efficient, collective decision-making process for 3,000 developers who are distributed across 100 countries? You know, those are not necessarily solved problems. You can go find a pattern to follow. So growth pains is better than non-growth pains, right? At least it's a positive growth thing. So one of the questions that came up with our last segment was how to make OpenStack easier for developers. Obviously it's always been about the developers, but when you're building out infrastructure and standing up a lot of code, there's a lot of foundational work that needs to get done in terms of the technology. At the same time, developers want, me too, Amazon, plus more features. How do you balance that the operationalizing of OpenStack as a community with just the needs of the basic developer? Yeah, I think this is where the strength of the ecosystem comes into play. Some people see all of the vendors and the companies involved as sort of a guarantee that there's going to be fighting and bickering, but it's such a big market out there. And really what we're talking about is changing the way that all IT is done, that every server, every storage device, every networking device, and every data center is managed. That's a huge opportunity, and there's not going to be one approach that works. So I think that really the ability to go get OpenStack as an appliance, get OpenStack as a distribution, get OpenStack as a public cloud service, or a host of private cloud, that is something that, again, it's really come along in the last six to nine months where we're seeing mature products. And we actually, the foundation created a service, it's at openstack.org slash marketplace. That sort of catalogs a lot of those different options and compares them. You know, we love open source, we're very bullish on it, we're excited about what you guys do, and when Martin Meekos was on recent, just on this last segment, I noticed he weaved in the lamp stack comment in the keynote, which we all love what happened with lamp stack, but if you look at the total population of developers back then, it's just sheer onboarding of more and more developers every year, more open source lines of code, more open source investment from venture capitalist, more adoption by big companies. So certainly a different technical environment from lamp to cloud. So I want to get your comment on that dynamic and also the comment from Jesse Proudman on our crowd chat that said cloud is being driven from the edges, quoting you, and he 100% agree with that. So, you know, there's a new dynamic in cloud, you can't just take lamp dynamics and saying that's going to be the model, it's obviously lamp did some things in that era, to the modern era and now. So comment on that. Yeah, I mean I think that lamp and especially Linux were really the pioneers that convinced business that open source was an okay thing to do. And which is kind of a crazy idea to think now that there's a time where it wasn't accepted or it was really risky. But I think that it's extremely widely accepted now. And I think that's one of the big differences. And I think the other one is I talked about the software defined economy. Every company today is a software company pretty much. I mean any company of any size does custom software development. They have tools, they have processes, they have customer interactions that are too key to just go by off the box or off the shelf box software. And so they're building it themselves. And in order to do that, they need infrastructure that attracts their developers and allows their developers to move quickly. And so it's definitely a movement that's driven by developers from the edges of the business who are just wanting to be able to work and move faster than ever before. So John, I wanted to get your take two on a couple of comments from Adrian in the last segment. He said, you know, kind of the good news is that the classic problem of OpenStack being just hard to deploy and hard to get going is basically solved in his words, you can get up and running in 20 minutes. But he said what the kind of the bad news or that we're not there yet is really getting the developers and getting more developers and a more active developer community. I wonder if you can kind of talk, speak to those comments and then assuming the second one is in line, you know, kind of what are some of the things you guys are doing to grow that developer engagement? Yeah, I mean, when we talk with users, the technology is not what we hear them say is like the main barrier to entry anymore. It's almost all cultural and organizational. And some of it is yes, you know, getting their developers on board, some of it is getting their IT team on board, getting their executives on board. It's a different kind of frame of mind to approach, you know, cloud versus traditional infrastructure. And that's part of it. In terms of attracting developers, I think that, you know, we're four years into this and when we started out, we had very raw technology and you've got to get that technology baked before you can attract a user base that's going to operate clouds. And you have to have those clouds operating before you can have developers who are programming against them. I think really, you know, in 2014 is when we're just getting to that point of really having a wide variety of public cloud options and, you know, easy to install private cloud options to start attracting those developers. And we, you know, throw out another link, developer.openstack.org. This is something we just kicked off, which is targeted directly at attracting those developers who are going to be writing their applications for cloud and want to be able to target open stack clouds. And what is that site doing for them? Yeah, so it gives you basically patterns for programming against an open stack environment. It gives you links to resources like libraries that abstract away what open stack cloud you're talking to so you can build hybrid applications. You can build hybrid applications across open stack and Amazon. So it's really a toolkit and documentation to help developers kind of accelerate into building really functional apps in an open stack world. So the other kind of thing that always comes up in an open source kind of context is, right, is big guys versus little guys and are the big guys just coming in because they want to join the club or they want to squish the little guys or are they really contributing? And there's been a lot of big companies making announcements in support of open stack and integrating with open stack. But then you get with HP purchasing eucalyptus, big guy taking out a little guy. So what's kind of your perception of the role of the really bigger enterprise players and how's that changed, say, the last year with respect to open stack? Well, I think that anytime that you can attract any company and get them into the fold, contributing source code to an open project, that's a win. And we're happy for everybody who has joined up and we have I think over 300 companies who have signed our corporate contributor license agreement now. Some of them, the first time they've ever done it, done that for an open source project. So very excited with the momentum that we've had on that front. But then yes, the contributions range all over the map. Sometimes they're making small contributions that are focused around just supporting a product that they have that integrates with open stack. The thing that I've been really happy to see from some of the larger players like HP and IBM and Red Hat is the way that they fund strategic contributions. Things like documentation and testing and Q&A for, you know, Q&A environments for everything that, all the software development that happens. Those are things that cost money, take up resources and sometimes, you know, the smaller guys, they don't have the spare resources to put into that. So you have to have both, you know. You have to have, I think, the smaller teams that are pushing the envelope on innovation and features. And then, you know, you need some of the very committed strategic players that have a lot of resources to bring to bear on those critical components that maybe aren't as sexy, but are just extremely important to maturity. Yeah, that's interesting, because nobody ever, that's the first time I've ever heard anyone really talk about making an investment in that type of infrastructure to really enable the community. And for them, it's just a couple of days, you know, run off the production line, right? Not a big thing, interesting. So on OpenStack Paris, give us a taste of what we're going to see there and just some updates on what do you expect to lure folks to come over or participate virtually. Well, so in OpenStack Paris, it's our first summit in Europe and definitely going to be a different audience every time we go to a different continent. The makeup shifts dramatically. And that is just, I think, really good, especially for people who are here in kind of the valley bubble. They get the same sorts of stories a lot. You go to Europe and you hear completely different stories. But we have a lot of users. One of the big themes that I think we're going to hear a lot about is telco operators and network function virtualization. NFV is just something that is, it's becoming real. It's not just another buzzword. And these telco operators, you know, this is a trillion dollar industry that is really embarking on remaking how they do all of their technology deployment. So that's a huge opportunity. OpenStack is in the middle of it. And we have Telefonico, Orange, Deutsche Telekom, Swisscom, AT&T, Inter from Italy. Just, you know, a half dozen or more telcos who are going to be there talking about, you know, this shift in this trillion dollar industry. And certainly the NFV is certainly a big part of it at the network level. Final comment, I want you to give folks a taste of this event here. Are you excited by it? Was it kind of an impromptu thing, really? But I mean, what surprises you about this event here? Well, I think that, you know, anytime we put these events on, it's really interesting to see, you know, who shows up and we've done these in Paris and Tokyo and Beijing and all over the world. And this is, you know, I think one of the first sort of general OpenStack events we've done like this here in Silicon Valley. And it's a great audience. It's sold out. If you go and you look at the sponsors, great companies who are here talking about their integrations with OpenStack, it gives you a real flavor, I think, for just how much OpenStack has grown, how broad it is now. You know, it really highlights to me the innovation and the community cohesiveness. Whenever you have kind of these flash events, I'm not calling it, they did some marketing around it, but it wasn't, you know, huge, you know, big tent event here. It's just really a testament to the community. And I think it's not going to stop. John, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Congratulations. I know you guys are really working hard with the community. This is theCUBE. Of course, we're documenting the growth. We'll go to the meetups. Jeff and I have been to a few meetups where we had some little debates, the API debates too. What's going on, the network layout. Again, if you have some interesting events in Silicon Valley, let us know. theCUBE's Silicon Valley is kicking off its operations this month, where we will do a little bit smaller events to get that signal out there, a lot of action. And this is theCUBE. We're here live for the big event here in Silicon Valley for OpenStack SV. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.