 Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE. Covering DockerCon 2017, brought to you by Docker and support from its ecosystem partners. Hi and welcome back to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's production of DockerCon 2017. I'm Stu Miniman and joining me for the wrap today, I have Jim Kobielis who's been my host for the whole day, part of the Wikibon team. Jim, been a long day, your first full day on theCUBE, you've been on many times. I've been invigorating, I've learned so much, this is an awesomely substantial show, so it's been wonderful, we've had so many great guests, oh my gosh, Ben Gullivan, everybody who came before, amazing material. All right, and my other guest for the wrap up is John Troyer who's been on the program many times, he's sometimes guest host of the program, so Chief Reckoner at Tech Reckoning. John, thanks for joining us. Hey, thanks so much for having me. All right, so we think, right, guests, I mean, you know, we had some really good guests, I mean, it's easy for me at the end of the day when you're like, oh, is energy flag, oh, let's have Ben Gullib, the CEO of the company that's, you know, where Docker's gone, and Jerry Chen, who always brings energy, part of the V-Mafia like yourself, you know, John, so, you know, really interesting stuff, but I want to step back, let's talk about the keynote. So, you know, I guess John, I'll start with you, you know, something we've been talking in the last year or so is, you know, this Docker, Docker, Docker hype, I felt like a little bit of a hype kind of was let out over the last year with the Docker data center, Docker swarm type activity, some of the ecosystem was a little frustrated with the direction that Docker, the company was going compared to where they wanted the open source project to do. Lot of open source, lot of developer talk today, what's your take on the announcements, the ecosystem, open source, so many things, but let's get us started. Sure, well, I didn't quite know what to expect, Stu. You know, we hear about Docker going more enterprise, they just made a big enterprise announcement, so I thought we might come in here and hear 45 minutes on digital transformation and, you know, the standard enterprise keynote that you get at every other keynote, and we did not get that this morning. I've seen Michael Dell give that keynote in this building, so, you know, totally. I'm listening, we didn't get that here, we've all heard that elsewhere. Well, at every conference for the last five years, I think, 10 years. So, they started off, they talked about the ecosystem, that was the first message this morning. It was about growth of the ecosystem, about growth of the partnership, growth of the projects, and so that was definitely playing to their strengths, and then they went straight to the code. This was a developer-centric keynote, they did live demos with real code, and so they were really playing to the audience here, which I think is still predominantly developers, and so they were signaling that, hey, they weren't going all enterprise. Now, the announcements were also interesting, but I think the signal from the keynote was that we are still here, we're all about developer experience, we're about making things simple. Yeah, I don't think there's too many shows where you'd start off and they're like, oh, here's how you can build really large containers, you know, easier with this multi-part build and showing all this Docker stuff and everything. Right, it's not the suits, it's not the big customers. Having said, does that mean you won't go to tomorrow's keynote because Ben said it's going to be all the enterprise stuff tomorrow? Oh, I live for the enterprise stuff, I'm really excited about tomorrow, so hopefully not too much digital transformation, but I think what Docker has announced the last month, again, not even talking about what happened today, but the Docker packaging, the Docker data, Docker Enterprise Edition versus Consumer Edition, and then not Consumer, Community Edition, sorry, and then the tiers of the Docker Enterprise Edition, I think is really kind of brilliant. Docker is at a real turning point in its evolution right now, and there was a lot of confusion around what is Docker the project, what is Docker the engine, what is Docker the company, and I think with this kind of packaging and then with the announcements today, I really think that they just cleared up a whole lot of confusion in the ecosystem. Yeah, I mean, coming in, I think, I heard a lot of people that were really excited that Container D got open source. You, we went to, all three of us went to a Kubernetes event last night that was over at the Google Fiber Space a couple of blocks from here, and it was, oh cool, I get, you know, all the open source, like Docker 1.0 stuff, I need, without all that upper level stuff and advanced things that Docker's building into it, so there's open source pieces, that goes into the Moby project, so, you know, Docker's, you know, committing, you know, doubling down on a lot of this, we're going to take all these pieces, we're going to work on them, community's going to build it, they can take kind of that composable view of putting the solutions in Docker, we'll package and have monetization, things that they'll do there, but, you know, the partner ecosystem can do different things with that. So what do you guys take on, you know, let's start with the Moby project first, some of these open source, you know, whole ecosystem, positive, think it's good? Yeah, very much so. So the maturation of the container ecosystem is in the form of, well, you can see it through with the announcements, one of which is customization, so customize containers to the finest degree, they've got that capability now with Moby, exactly. It's all about containers everywhere, containerization of applications is now the dominant theme in the developer community across all segments, so I think Docker has done the right thing, which is doubling down on developers, doubling down on the message and the tooling now for both customization of containers, but also for portability, you know, with the Linux kid announcement and so forth. It's, you know, containerization, microservices and so forth across all segments, like one of the areas that I focus on is artificial intelligence, deep learning, containerization's coming to that in a big way as well. A lot of it is to drive things like autonomous vehicles and drones and whatnot, but we're going to see containerization come to every other segment of data science, deep learning machine, learning and so forth. It's not just, you know, the people at this show, it's other developer communities that are coming to containerization in a big way and Docker is becoming a premier development tool vendor for them, or will be. So Jim, Stu, I think even more tactically, right, there was this confusion about Docker the engine, Docker the container runtime, Docker the container specification. Now, as pulling that out with container D and now with Linux kit, that, you always had the thing where Red Hat would say, well, we have OpenShift, you know, it's like Docker or it has a piece of Docker or it can work with Docker, you have Cloud Foundry, it's like Docker or has a Docker or can work with Docker now. And so everybody had to do this dance by saying, well, we use some of the technology there. Now, very clean split, very different branding. We use Linux kit, we use container D, we use all, you know, we use the Moby framework and that actually will help, again, help, like, look, the death of commercial success is confusion. If a buyer does not understand how to get what you want or what you're selling, he's never going to buy anything. So. I think we'd seen the end of Docker's, you know, it's, well, a battery is included but removable, cause some confusion in the marketplace and people are like, well, but it's not easy, that's kind of what's there. I want to be able to choose the pieces up front. We talked about, with Brian Grace earlier today, you know, what is the opinionated platform? Because there's certain solutions, you know, Microsoft wants to build what they want and they're, they have lots of options but when they want to build an upper level service, it might have the pieces underneath that they care about. It's not like, oh, okay, wait, I have to do this and I have to uninstall this. I mean, that was like in Linux all the time. It's like, oh, I'm recompiling, I'm recompiling, I have to add things in and remove them. It's like, no, no, no, I want it in box, in the kernel and then I can choose and activate what I need. My guess is that next year, my prediction is that next year at DockerCon, Docker will double down on experience, developer experience. There's not enough of it yet here. I think that will be a core theme for them going forward to continue to deepen their mind share in that community. I actually will, I'm going to, I'll take that and double it. Okay. One of the reasons that I think one of the factors that caused VMware to come to prominence was its operator experience and its simplicity. VMware HA, high availability was a one check box. VMware distributed resource schedule which moved, virtual machines around, one check box, right? And so with Docker's focus on developer usability and developer experience with today's announcements of Linux kit, that could actually be a huge, huge deal. If in the future, the application development pipeline greatly depends on building a just enough operating system as we used to say back in the day of VMware and with Jerry Chen. Yeah, yeah, good old juice. Yeah, if that becomes the defining characteristic of building cloud native apps, being able to, and it is, right? The Docker file is the defining document of our time. If that's the case and now they've taken it into the Linux distribution world, which could have repercussions for the whole ecosystem, that could be Docker's, again, their magic check box that the developer experience of rolling out a custom stack has just been, the level has just been raised. And Linux kit is not new to the world. They just open sourced it today, but it's what they're using to get out their Docker for AWS and Docker for Google Cloud, Docker on public clouds already uses it, right? So it's in production today. I'm super impressed. Yeah, and I think there was potential that it could have caused more confusion or upset in the ecosystem, but we interviewed Red Hat and Canonical today, and I'm not saying that they jumped up and down and embraced and said, oh, goody, but it wasn't, it was like, oh yeah, okay, that's fine. It's not there because there's always going to be that co-optition. I mean, Jim, you came most recently from IBM, the company that I most associated with that word, co-optition. So there's always, you know, there's the swim lanes, there's where you partner together and there's where, you know, sometimes your bump heads is just driving you, you know. So, yeah. And I don't think people should be too alarmed. I mean, not from a technical level, right? There's stuff that runs in containers and there's stuff that runs underneath containers. And I mean, there's still a role for Ubuntu and there's still a role for Red Hat and there's still a role for CoreOS and Rancher, you know, but it, I don't know. I don't know enough, I don't have enough of a crystal ball to say what we'll be talking about next year. It could have actually a fairly large ripple effect going out of the ecosystem. John, you've also, you've dug into, with a couple of vendors here, you know, what about the storage space? It's one we've been digging at a bit, you know. There's still the general consensus is we still have a little ways to go on the maturity. It's the furthest behind, you know, big surprise just like VMware, you know. We spent over a decade doing that. You know, what should you take on storage, any other comments on just the broad ecosystem, what needs to be worked on and improved over time? Well, I think storage is the next area that needs to be worked on. I mean, that's the next piece that we see is still a little bit fragmented. I've heard from many vendors here at the show that even from Docker itself, that the surprising thing is that containers are not just for cloud native apps. A lot of people, a lot of the enterprise journey, and I imagine we're going to hear about that tomorrow's keynote starts with, you know, containerizing your big legacy apps. Yeah, yeah, well, it's funny. I made a comment at the Google Cloud event, you know, in San Francisco what a month ago. I'm like, hey, when did lift and shift all of a sudden become sexy? And it's, of course, nuanced on that. And we've had a few interviews, Jim, where we talked about, look, you know, there's initiatives that we want to do, the cool lap modernization and everything there. But in the meantime, it is not a bimodal world. We're not going to leave our old stuff there and, you know, let it slowly have Larry the engineer, you know, keep an eye on it and sleep all the time. It's, you know, the whole world needs to kind of move forward. Containers are part of the way to give us, you know, the bridge to the future, if you will. Yeah, how do you containerize a legacy app, a mainframe app, for example, that's got a petabyte of data in storage. I mean, you just got to work through the data, I mean, the deep data issues there, you know? Yeah, well, hey, you can run Docker on a mainframe. I mean, I've done interviews on that. You worked with those people, Jim, and it's one of those, oh, wait, okay, right, so there's pieces that'll be updated and pieces that'll change. You know, John, you and I have talked, I remember early days of VMware, it was, you know, let me take that horrible 10-year-old application that's running on Windows NT, which is going into life, and my hardware is going to die. Let me shove it in a VM and leave it there for another five, 10 years. And it was like, please don't do that. So, you know. And sometimes the real world intrudes. I think we are, part of this problem does get smoothed over or confused, but we're talking about both on-prem apps and public cloud apps. And that can get a little confusing because the storage issues going back to storage are a little different, right? Especially in the public cloud, you've got issues of data locality, you've got issues of latency, performance, and so you see a number of vendors that are approaching it. It's very easy to connect the container to some sort of persistent volume. It is very hard to give something that is performance and is backed up and you know it's going to be there. The storage industry has spent decades on those problems. I don't think we're there yet. In terms of the generic container that is floating either in public cloud or on-prem. They can handle the hybrid data cloud scenarios in which there are myriad in terms of public and private zones within a distributed data architecture with varying degrees of volume, velocity, and variety. Managing all of that data in a containerized environment with rich orchestration among them for replication and streaming and so forth. You can do it but it's not, it's very, it's cutting edge right now. Yeah, it's cutting edge. So John, last question I have to ask you is something near and dear to your heart. When you talk about kind of careers and people that are doing, we talked about, there's a lot of people here that are like, oh, people I used to see in the VMware community that learning all the cool new stuff. Anything you see, is Docker doing evangelism, program the like influencer program type things? Are you seeing anything in the educational spaces from career space? What can you show? Sure, Docker's very rich in community. It's kind of in the engine of their growth. They've long had a huge user group program. They have a campus program. They have a mentorship program. And they also have the Docker captains. The Docker captains started, oh, I don't know, a year and a half ago, and it's an advocacy program. There's, I think there's 70 of them now. They work very closely with them. They come from all across the ecosystem, which is kind of interesting. Everybody from Dell EMC and other, many companies. So that's pretty cool that these people, it feels a lot like early days of VMware. These people have day jobs, but yet they spend their nights and weekends hacking on Docker. And Docker takes advantage of that. I mean, in the best sort of way. They give them opportunities. They give them platforms to speak. They give them platforms to help others. So, and I see that's in full force here. They have a track here at the show. So Docker's leaning heavily on its community. I even saw one person here, Stu, from a mainline storage company said, you know what, my company's not here, but I am, because I got to learn how to do this. So I think people who are here have a good next phase of their career. That's a smart, a community advocacy program of that sort. I mean, just, well, is the, is even, actually, it's even more important than an event like this in terms of deepening the loyalty of the developers to a solution provider and their growing stacks. Docker, the company is very small. There's a very large community at a very small company. So you need... 320-some-odd people or something like that. They have to leverage those resources. Exactly. All right, well, Jim, thanks for all your help. Co-hosting today. John, really appreciate you coming in, especially some of that community ecosystem expertise that you bring in. And by the way, John's going to be co-hosting OpenStack Summit with me. Another one that we'll have lots to dig on as to where that ecosystem community is and where it's going in a couple of weeks in, you know, my home state of Massachusetts in Boston. So be sure to tune in. Tomorrow we've got a full day of coverage. First guest is going to be Solomon Hikes coming off the day two keynote. We're going to talk a little bit more about enterprise. We've got a full lineup of guests. So be sure to check out SiliconANGLE.tv for everything there. So for Jim Covellis, John Troyer, and myself, Stu Miniman, thank you for watching day one of the CUBE's coverage, Dr. Khan 2017.