 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2017, brought to you by Red Hat. Brian, good to see you again. Thanks for being, thanks for having me. You're welcome. I said, good to see you again. We thought we had you on before, but maybe not, but anyway, hopefully we'll- Have lots of rackers in the last, I did the next. We feel like, you know, Rack Space is, you know, one of ours with Cuba Lumber. So, Red Hat Summit, obviously a big show for the industry, big show for Rack Space, but your focus is on OpenStack, you're the general manager of the OpenStack business. You guys started OpenStack, I mean, you and some others, but it was really the seed and the vision of Rack Space. So, bring us up to date as to where you are now. OpenStack initiative. To your point, it kind of goes back to 2010, where Rack Space and NASA essentially co-invented OpenStack and opened it up as a community project and made it open source. Again, the intent was, how do you help leverage the innovation of a community to help build cloud infrastructure? How do we, at that time it was really focused on public and private cloud. Rack Space, over the years, certainly our public cloud was built on OpenStack and we continue to do a lot of that focus in upstream innovation and contributing and how do you make this platform scale very massively? Over the last several years, where we've seen great adoption of OpenStack specifically though, is in private cloud solutions. So, we have built a practice over the last several years, building, deploying and operating private clouds for customers. In our data centers, in their data centers, third party data centers, and that's where we've seen a lot of growth in that. Brian, I wonder if you can help us unpack that a little bit. I know you and I are going to be back here in Boston, oh, down the road at the Hines for OpenStack Summit next week, but when you hear kind of the general discussion, OpenStack has changed a lot in the last few years. So, there are people that throw stones and are like, oh well, it's done, it's over, sounds like you've got a good, robust business. Tell us, where are people using it, how are they using it, what is it kind of replacing or helping them grow their businesses? Yeah, OpenStack itself, if you think of this arc of an open source project and the rapid innovation, how quickly it's matured, over the last couple years, OpenStack itself has really become a solid platform, infrastructure as a service. In fact, I think I heard a comment as of the Barcelona Summit, where an analyst or media or somebody said, OpenStack is now boring, because a lot of the drama or rapid change has really come out of it, many of the core projects have very much matured. You do hear, is OpenStack dead? Are people going straight to containers on bare metal? Is this the end of the space? In practice, we are seeing it is still how am I consuming or building cloud native apps, I'm consuming cloud services, and certainly in a private cloud context, I'm looking for that power and agility that I see from a public cloud, but delivered in a private cloud form factor, and we're still seeing huge adoption for OpenStack in that use case. Well, and there's a lot of misconceptions about OpenStack over the years, and part of it was just sort of put out there and said, okay, let's see what happens, but when public John Furrier, other co-host of theCUBE called it a Hail Mary against Amazon, okay? Well, you know, in a way, people needed some kind of alternative, and it's really emerged as the only, correct me if I'm wrong, but really the only open platform to build private clouds on. And when you say, oh, it was OpenStack dead, you hear that from a lot of the legacy enterprise companies who were sort of doing their own proprietary private cloud. So to your point, it's become a platform with momentum for the thoughts on that. Yeah, I think to your point, those that are really saying it's dead and they're doing their own proprietary cloud, that's really just virtualization at scale. They're not really consuming cloud services in the same framework that OpenStack delivers it. So it is still a vibrant and growing platform. We're seeing it as the platform of choice for not just how do I move virtualized workloads, but even for containers and other orchestrated solutions on top of that as well. So it really is this underpinning technology that people are consuming for private and hybrid types of scenarios. And Red Hat would argue, I wonder if you could weigh in on this, that in order for you to build a true hybrid cloud, we use the term true private cloud, we can extend that to true hybrid cloud, you've got to have a sort of modern infrastructure that's open on-prem, or else you're going to be just sort of force fitting, you know, square pegs and round arms. I think there's a lot of validity to that, especially when you think about the concept of portability or leveraging moving applications between different platforms. If I have a truly siloed infrastructure, I don't have that capability. Whereas if you look at leveraging these open platforms of OpenStack and the tooling that I can use on top of that cloud forms and other services, and certainly as I move into paths and containers, I now have much more portability on where I can deploy and operate these different technologies. So Brian, congratulations, you guys are an innovation award winner. Can you talk a little bit about the solutions and what you guys are working closely with Red Hat to be your customers? Yeah, it's really excited. So we were awarded one of their innovator of the year awards for cloud infrastructure. And the way this came about is Rackspace and Red Hat have a mutual customer that really came to us where they were looking for a private cloud delivered as a service. They're looking for the operational expertise that Rackspace brings in operating these technologies at scale, but we're looking for a fully certified Red Hat stack. And at that time, we didn't have an offering around the Red Hat OpenStack platform. We obviously have a long standing relationship with Red Hat and support a number of Red Hat technologies across our businesses. But in the OpenStack space, we had not productized or brought to market a managed service around the Red Hat OSP platform. And so we partnered very closely with them to bring this solution to market. But it's not as simple as just saying, voila, now we have our Red Hat offering. Our focus is really to bring the operator's perspective to it. So we spent 18 months in total, if you think about from when we really kicked off this effort with them, deploying and operating and scaling and testing and going through all the stages of patching and upgrading and running different workload profiles and really scalability testing and feeding back a lot of innovation into the Red Hat team. It led to a number of enhancements that have come in later releases of RELL OSP, which allowed us to really get to a platform that we could stand behind, provide as a managed service and deliver a four nines availability SLA around it. And so this is the offering that we brought together. We're being recognized for some of those innovations that we fed back into it. We consume their distributed continuous integration environment. So we through the DCI platform, we execute over 1500 tests on a daily basis, which allows us to deliver the latest release of RELL OSP to our customers within two weeks of a given major release. We made a number of networking opinionated enhancements and how can we break out load balancing from the control plane. Things allow us to deploy and operate these solutions at a much larger scale. Yeah, maybe if you speak to, you know, one of the challenges we've heard for OpenStack for years is it's kind of complicated and how do we do this? And I have to think kind of the Red Hat service and support model partnered with the fanatical support from Rackspace, you know, should be able to address some of those concerns for customers. Yeah, that's honestly, that's where I think we've found the most success with customers is OpenStack itself is a very powerful tool, but it is complex. It's not something that you're just going to download and run on a VM in your laptop to gain experience with it. Built by rocket scientists, what do you expect? Literally, quite literally. So the complexity does continue to be a barrier to adoption for many enterprises. That's where our focus of being the operators and delivery as a service has been so key for many customers. And then getting that fully compliant or certified stack from Red Hat, the software assurance that comes with that has been a great fit to allow customers to really grow. You mentioned platform as a service. It's too early, you're like, you made the comment of, you know, the platform formerly known as Paz. There's a lot of discussion about Paz. Well, it's really not here anymore. Can you guys at least start with Brian and maybe Stu, you can chime in. What's happening with Paz? Is it getting subsumed? I often say infrastructure as a service plus or SaaS minus, what's happening with Paz? Because when you talk to companies like Oracle, it's like, oh, our Paz business is rocking. You know, so what's really happening out there? Yeah, I'm sure you have thoughts on this too. I believe that Paz is still a very strong plane. That's where many organizations now they're embracing cloud and cloud native development are looking to move up the step and leverage more fabric like services, things that are Paz can provide them, that integrated development environment. How do I make it easy to consume different data services? Removing the core screen building blocks that I would otherwise have to orchestrate or manage myself. So we do see a lot of adoption for that. It's kind of that progression. As I'm moving up, I'm moving into cloud native designs and architectures, now I'm looking to really empower and enable my developers to consume these fabric services moving up the stack. Yeah, and comment on my comment is if you look at what's happening with the container space, you heard about what Red Hat talked is how they take that piece. It's still, I want to be able to take my application, have how I built that and have some flexibility as to where that lives. And that was one of the core values of what Paz was going to offer because, right, if I want to do, you know, Red Hat is the example with OpenShift, I want to do it on-premises, I want to do it in AWS, I want to do it, you know, with Google, I have that flexibility. Maybe we're just not calling it Paz anymore. Yeah, yeah, I think that's good. I think if you look at the move to containerization, there are still those other components or services that I need to consume, right? How am I solving for identity and networking and storage and all these other components that go into it? And this is where some of the Paz frameworks can help that. Yeah, go ahead. Just one piece, Rackspace has a really interesting kind of portfolio of services. You're partnering with all the big cloud guys, you've got private cloud. What do your customers think when you kind of say hybrid cloud or multi-cloud, how does that fit into kind of where they are today and where they're making their strategy for cloud going forward? Yeah, it's, again, Rackspace does represent a very large portfolio. We are the managed cloud company. I obviously am very focused on our private cloud and OpenStack, but we have as practices, we help enable customers to either migrate to, deploy or operate on Amazon Web Services. Certainly the Azure platform, and recently we announced Google Compute providing support for that. We have customers that are coming us looking for help in architecting or moving to these, but the reality is is almost all customers and they touch on that during the keynote here. We live in a multi-vendor strategy or multi-cloud strategy. Certain clouds, either geographically or feature-set-wise, are better suited for certain applications or workloads, and so many of our customers are living in that hybrid cloud world, where I'm leveraging multiple different platforms depending on workload placement or other rules to that. Where Rackspace has really stepped in is providing that cloud expertise and helping them leverage that, providing tooling to help them deploy and operate in these different environments. In some cases where it's portability literally move the same application around, but oftentimes it's really workload placement and how do I more effectively use it? We were talking in our open about the bromide from Mark Andreese and softwares eating the world, and the implication and tying that into a Benioff statement that there'll be more SaaS companies coming out of non-tech companies than tech companies. You're seeing some big SaaS tech companies like Workday and Salesforce and Infor has always been there moving to the Amazon cloud and others who are maybe saying, well, I'm not sure I want to move to the Amazon cloud, but my specific question is relative to SaaS take up on things like OpenStack, what are you seeing there? Yeah, ironically, certainly in private cloud, that's probably one of our biggest areas of growth is companies that are launching SaaS platforms for all the same reasons that they would be using an AWS to back that, right? They have the agility and rapid growth and elasticity that they can build into it, but they're running their platform and depending on HR, you mentioned Workday, we have another great example, Ultimate Software. They run their platform, again, it's HR management and other services. They want to run in a private cloud context, but deploying that framework where they can leverage cloud native deployment, OpenStack has been a great fit for that and helped them grow and scale. Okay, so what's next for you guys in your world? Yeah. OpenStack, can you give us a little roadmap and what we should expect? Sure. For us, very specifically, if you focus on the IaaS layer, we continue to be very focused on operational efficiencies. How are we helping customers get the right unit economics out of a private cloud? So getting to greater densities, higher performance, more optimal usage of their cloud as we bring more visibility to actual capacity planning and passive management and how are they, make sure they're really leveraging or growing their cloud as they can. And then certainly from a feature set where we continue to move up and adopt these other services. I know we touched on earlier on the PaaS, this is an area where we're starting to get a lot of customer demand saying, can you help us in this area? Are the things that you can be doing, going straight to native Kubernetes or looking at the different PaaS frameworks like OpenShift or Cloud Foundry, these are areas that we're starting to work more and more to potentially bring services to help customers really leverage these platforms. Paul Cormier was talking about how early days of the cloud, everybody thought, everything was going to Amazon and so forth. But everything is going to the cloud, whether it's a private cloud or a public cloud. I know somebody told me the other day they're running an application on VMS. Okay, so some stuff never dies. But generally the world will be cloud, maybe we'll stop using the words like cloud and digital. Well, a camera, it's not a digital camera, but with thoughts on that, is that? Yeah, I think you're spot on. I mean, there's a long tail, right? Like there's still a lot of AS 400 out there and things that are, although with open power, maybe you could make the argument it's coming to open stack anyway. It is, if you think about any Greenfield development is all being done in cloud native ways. If you look at folks coming out of school and new application development, nobody's developing in the context of bare metal or legacy client server apps that are kind of built in that framework. I think even as enterprises continue to re-platform services, they're moving into that cloud way so that they can take the long-term benefits of agility and cost savings that they're looking for. So it will become, you're right, at some point we're going to stop calling it cloud. It's just, it's the way you're consuming infrastructure. Brian, final question I have for you. A piece that I hadn't heard enough about when it comes to open stack is that kind of application modernization and re-platforming. How does open stack fit into that discussion with your customers? You know, I'm worried we talked in the keynote this morning about it's like, oh okay, we're going to do new stuff but we might move the old stuff. We're not just moving the old stuff and leaving it, right? You know? You're absolutely right. If you think of enterprises that are adopting or going all in on open stack, they have, if you go back to the pets versus cattle analogy everybody knows, they have lots of pets that they need to care for. So we've looked at and we've actually worked very hard with many customers on how do I leverage things like Cep as to back Nova and help bring things like live migration and other services that help open stack still cater to those pets and not force them in a full cloud native model. How can I still deliver some amount of resiliency and failure in the infrastructure so that the app doesn't have to be aware of it? And that way they can have one environment to run both new cloud development but also still care for those legacy apps. Excellent. Ryan, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to have you. Thank you guys. And enjoy the rest of the show. Thank you. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest at theCUBE. We're live from Red Hat Summit in Boston. Right back.