 Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Percona live event in Silicon Valley, the hardest Silicon Valley in Santa Clara, California. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angle. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise and it's all about the database. It's all about the data. It's all about the cloud. It's all about the enabling developers to build those next generation modern infrastructures and our next guests are from Rackspace. We have Shawnee Anderson, Product Marketing, big cloud, big data solutions and Daniel Moore, Senior Manager of Database Products. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, John. Glad to be here. Shawnee, welcome back to you. A CUBE alumni, as we say, we've interviewed over 3,200 people on theCUBE since we started and you're one of them. So we'd love having Rackspace on because we've been following Rackspace's involvement certainly in the cloud and then now the beginning of OpenStack up through now the evolution of OpenStack and you guys have been a real major actor in the build out of OpenStack which at the beginning of time, even just a few short years ago with Amazon kind of winning the game infrastructure as a service, you guys built out your own cloud. Get some acquisitions here and there but for the most part, early days as developers became more DevOps you guys were central to that equation. So congratulations. Thank you. But now we're continuing to see the revolution of the cloud, right? And cloud being the engine of innovation. Obviously mobile, mobile first, some people say and you haven't even had the CEO of Microsoft this week talking about cloud first. We say data first. If you look at data, it's what people store stuff in. No SQL database, it's a structured database. It's not changing, it's a scale equation. So I got to ask you guys relative to Rackspace's involvement with your customers about scale and cloud in particular. So where are we in all this and what role does the MySQL community play in that? Sure, so I think you made a great point about kind of data in the cloud. I think what we're seeing now is more of that data natively kind of lives in the cloud and it lives on the cloud from kind of day one whether it's social data, whether it's machine data, whatever we're collecting, it's not just kind of core infrastructure data, right? So people are saying, well as long as it's landing on the cloud, why ingest that internally? Can we process it on the cloud? Can we utilize different data technologies to kind of process it where it lives? And so that's really put the onus on us to create kind of a portfolio of data services that kind of addresses that. And MySQL being a section that we've excelled in for many years and have a lot of core content to see, the onus is on us to be kind of experts and specialists in MySQL and help people understand how that transition those workloads to the cloud. Yeah, Daniel, I want to get your perspective on this because we were talking earlier in a previous day with the IDC guy, the analyst, and to talk about MySQL. And MySQL has done amazing things and certainly it's still a revolutionary concept if you think about where it's come from and where it's going. So I want to get your take on it with MySQL now scaling up, if you will. We're seeing even hundreds of thousands of pre-existing developers in MySQL, but new developers are coming in. So what's your take on where MySQL is and where is it going? Right, so over the, I was actually doing some research back, I was kind of doing some compare and contrast to what MySQL did over the last 10 to 15 years versus what MongoDB is doing today. And it's funny to see that you look back, MySQL garnered the support of the development community and I think building a vibrant ecosystem and allowing for multiple forks within that ecosystem to exist. And we actually see that still growing today. So you see kind of future now, well, MariaDB is as bright as ever. Percona is still going. You've got the consortium coming out with the web scale MySQL, which I think it's just adding to the fact that when people think, just when people think that MySQL is running out of steam, the community rallies around it and pushes back into it to figure out, as workloads change, as things move to the cloud, how do we sort of bring MySQL forward? And it's not only a world where MySQL exists by itself, more and more talking to customers, we see that they're not just running MySQL, like there's a new stack emerging. It's MySQL, it's with MongoDB, with Redis. You know, there's a new component on the data side of the new LAMP stack that's evolving and how customers are deciding to build their applications and MySQL will continue to be a part of that. We're seeing a lot of spectrums emerging, the old school general purpose scale up kind of environments to on the other end of the spectrum, you know, scale out open source. You're seeing the poster child's there, you know, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, the variety of the guys who built their own, right? And then every all these other enterprises kind of sit in the middle going, hey, I want to be more like those guys. I don't want the general purpose, vendor, disk, software. I want to do open source, but I want to make sure it's reliable, right? So that becomes a challenge, right? Because there's talent involved. You got to have the people. So that's essentially what I call the DevOps world, right? That's the DevOps world of, okay, I got developers acting with code, software, using cloud, if you will, or hosted environments on premise or cloud, is the unique trend that's driving all these new innovations. And then you tack on that some other complicating vectors like Internet of Things, big data, whatever you want to call it, big data. You know, we had one guy say, big data is everything that doesn't fit in RAM. Okay, that's cool. I can see where he's coming from, he's a storage guy. But when you factor in like Internet of Things, all these things, it's like a tsunami of data, yet all the architectures are changing to move to this DevOps culture. So it's pretty complicated to kind of grok all that if you're just a mainstream guy sitting there in DBA for admin, you know, since this admin DBA, sitting around, you know, old gear. What do you guys talk to those guys and what do you say to them? How do you get them from the old way, moving them from one side of the street to the other? I think that's a good question. I think we're in a unique position because we can kind of listen to, you know, our current install base and how they're making that transition and a couple of things that we've seen, right? You made a good point about kind of the Facebooks and the Googles of the world. I think everybody wants to understand how these companies leverage the technology and especially at that type of scale made that shift to newer technologies because there's a lot at stake when they do that. Luckily there's a lot of smart minds too to make sure that that's done successfully. Then you kind of have, you know, the middle of the road which, you know, they're gonna see instant ROI and exploring new technologies. And so that's very easy for them. But I actually think bigger enterprises are probably struggling even more making these shifts because they have legacy systems, they have mainframes, they have all of these legacy technologies that they have to put a lot of calculated time. And they gotta hire new people. Hire new people, they've gotta integrate with all those legacy systems. And so for them it's not just a single switch. It's not I have an application, I'm changing the back end of this from one technology to the other. It's I have a whole bunch of systems working in synergy, some successfully and some unsuccessfully. How do I transition that into a new technology and how do I fit that in there with the current capital of people that we have? And I think that's why you see with the newer technologies, you know, a lot of striving to put in sequel syntax and my sequel type syntax because there's a great DBA community that has been the lifeblood of the success of these systems and they're just trying to make that accessible. Let's talk about that for a second before we get into some of the specifics around Radisson for Conan Live stuff and then Maria DP et cetera here. Let me look at the mindset of an old school enterprise. You know, they've seen the wars of their generations go from IT, everything's in house control developers or that's mainframe client server to outsourcing everything, right? So I'm going to outsource everything and also they lose control. It makes sense if you're consolidating and reducing costs. But now we're in the other side of the spectrum where it's growth and build and monetize, right? Okay, is cloud an outsource model? How does someone get the benefits of cloud economically like almost outsourcing? And if you will not to say it's outsourcing but maintaining control because that seems to be the issue. Where's the control point? Can enterprises maintain control? Well, you know, I think I like to think about this not just in a cloud context but I mean, you look at Rackspace and I think we're uniquely positioned in that, you know, for customers trying to think about where they're going to run their workloads and who they're going to use as, you know, a trusted provider to do that. We have multiple models in which we can do this. So there isn't, we don't exist in a world where it's cloud or nothing. Since if you, we can bring customers along if they want half of the workloads in a dedicated model. They want to build their own private cloud because they have trust issues as far as security. We can do that as well. And if they want to bring it fully over in the cloud we have solutions for that as well. So there's a unique kind of spectrum of services that we can do. Customers that want to do it themselves. We have a model for that. All the way to a full defined as a service. We take care of everything. DBA is on the back end. There's kind of a host of options that we can do in order to lower those barriers to entry and sort of get customers over into these new models. And I think what that really speaks to is that they're not ready to fully go cloud. There's a lot of toe dipping involved. There's a lot of consultation that actually happens in transitioning those workloads and transitioning in a way that's really successful and kind of this trade off of do I want to trade performance for multi-tenancy or ease of operation. And so if I can tailor those workloads to a specific technology, I'd say that there's probably no one single source of truth for that. I think even as Rackspace we have a great public cloud infrastructure but we'd be very wary to tell somebody to completely port successful applications to the cloud or to manage because we're there to facilitate them on that journey. And I think that also exacerbates another point which is where the roadmap becomes increasingly more important. What we see with people looking to make kind of these large scale migrations to cloud infrastructure, they wanna know that where they're taking their infrastructure has the items on the roadmap that they wanna do. So does this infrastructure provider provide support around Mongo because maybe I'm not using Mongo today but in the future that's something that I wanna do and data's very hard to move and it's sticky. So if I'm gonna put all my data in a single place I should have confidence in the roadmap and confidence in their strategy moving in the future. So I know that moving large amounts of data is not gonna be cumbersome if I decide that you change that strategy. Let's talk about the LAMP stack. LAMP stack is an acronym about people developing around open source, Linux, et cetera. Very easy, a lot of developers came on LAMP stack but now you have not just LAMP stack it's a lot of different stacks. So you mentioned Redis and all the things you know Amazon is the last thing being stock and other tools are coming in. Some people are saying fully integrated stacks is the way to go with DevOps, software as code, infrastructure as code. Whatever you wanna, I won't call it. It's not just LAMP stack anymore. It's LAMP stack developer I learned. Now I have a lot of other tools available. Is that gonna get more complex? Daniel, what do you see that with the stack wars? I mean I guess I don't view it as necessarily a stack war. I do think that the gone is the era of I have three database vendors to choose from and I'm gonna pick my one and I'm gonna build my app around it. We're seeing now more choices ever in the database market be it you want non-relational document model with Mongo or you're looking to accelerate your app with things like Redis, Memcached or if you're looking for pure relational model you've got Postgres, MySQL, multiple variants with Percona and MariaDB. The list goes on, still SQL servers still there and Oracle still there. There's immense amounts of choice and this idea of I mentioned this earlier that the LAMP stack and it's from the past is kind of going away and you're seeing customers that are choosing multiple of these technologies and you have things like MongoDB which is really mirroring a lot of what MySQL did when it sort of came to prominence in the sense that MongoDB is ridiculously easy to get started with. It follows a document model that is really it's close to what programmers want to do when they're building their applications and so you're seeing proliferation of these databases popping up everywhere new apps being built on top of them and along the way customers having trouble scaling and so a lot of the developers today when they're choosing a database technology they are a lot of times they're getting to this point where they need a database, they need to put their data somewhere but they really don't want to deal with it anymore and so you're starting to see a shift of more and more application developers don't want to have to deal with scaling the database, running the database, dealing with partition tolerance and all of these things that happened when they tried to scale them in the cloud and that's something that we're trying as Rackspace we're bringing in real deep expertise to think about how can we enable our customers to run these more complicated workloads because we live in this world of numerous database technologies behind these applications, the applications of tomorrow. So what is Rackspace doing in all of this? I see you guys have to be the den of all customers and provide them with the tooling for cloud and deal a lot of the nuanced use cases some are different verticals have different use cases. What are you guys doing with the commitment around MySQL and the different forks that some of the grids may not be good but you have to kind of play both sides of the fence. What are you guys doing? So it really put the onus on us to kind of create this portfolio of data services and this is something that's new for Rackspace but has a lot of steam and I think is moving really quickly and it's really to address the problems of today and kind of also address the concerns of where we see the kind of industry going with that and more and more of our customers they just want to know that there's some expertise around those workloads kind of as I said earlier. So we now have a data services portfolio it consists of things like cloud databases which is our MySQL databases of service offering. We partnered with Hortonworks nearly about a year and a half ago to bring a Hadoop cloud offering and that's actually based on open standards pure vanilla Hortonworks data platform. We made an acquisition of a company called Object Rocket that does a very performant way to play MongoDB another acquisition of a company called Exceptional Cloud Services that does Redis to go and this is all within the last year. So you can really see a concerted effort for Rackspace to really start to ramp up the capabilities around data and I think that the other part of that that you really spoke to is the orchestration size of things like OpenStack and things like automation in the cloud, stack automation, orchestration in the cloud DevOps I think those worlds really try to are gonna kind of collide because you can't have one without the other you can't have integrated services without an integrated way to deploy them and kind of construct them. Let's break this down. So infrastructure as a service that's one sector it's we all kind of know what's going on there let's get some compute storage all integrated converged in scaled up whenever at a whim. Talk about infrastructure as a service and let's talk about pass right after. Sure. So I think infrastructure as a service is a pretty comfortable place for Rackspace 10 plus years of infrastructure hosting. I think in today's world you have to start reaching in those application layers to really add value. Infrastructure is now a commodity like oil to where people can consume it and kind of a brokerage model. So Rackspace really has to try to understand what are the things limiting that adoption? What are the things that are inhibiting companies from moving to the types of technologies that they really want to consume? And I think that's where platform of service becomes increasingly more popular and that's a new area for Rackspace. I think we've been in the platform game really in the past four to five years as far as developing cloud products. That's mainly OpenStack. Yeah, OpenStack and of course our public cloud products that are based on the OpenStack technology. We really try to eat our own dog food. Let's make everything on OpenStack and kind of proliferate that. But I know Daniel could probably speak more to the platform piece but that's, we're playing that. Let's talk platform of services. We covered the IBM Pulse event. They announced Blue Mix with Cloud Foundry. Rackspace was actually in that press release with a bunch of other people. It looked like a good set of industry leaders kind of endorsing that. But Solom's right around the corner, right? Solom is not yet released but very active on discussion boards. But there's different approaches in platform as a service. It's thin and fat kind of approach. Cloud Foundry, some say, a little bit bloated. Solom wants to be more thinner. And then where's Red Hat and all this? So where is the OpenStack? Is the OpenStack fragile or is it still agile? I mean, I don't think, I wouldn't use fragile to describe it. I think that I would put it more on the agile side. And I do think that OpenStack is evolving. I mean, it started out, we know as a pure kind of infrastructure play, right? But it is as the, I've seen that I was at the first OpenStack Summit, I saw it scale from 200 people to, I think the last one I was at, there was six to 8,000 people in attendance, this vibrant community that's existed. And I think the mission and the model of OpenStack has evolved rapidly. And so that's why I give it that sort of agile stamp and that they are moving where the community and all the different players, IBM's in this, Rackspace is in this, HP, they're all in there sort of shaping its direction. And so you're seeing it go from pure infrastructure to having database services, to having platform-based services, to having orchestration services. You're seeing all these layers get built out. And I think Solom, we live in this world where yes, you have Cloud Foundry, you have multiple passes and you have Solom and it's kind of like, well, this is what another pass provider, but one within the context of OpenStack that lives and speaks and breathes and works well tightly with that OpenStack framework. So there's definitely room for it. Well, competition is always good for the marketplace. Within the day, you don't want to confuse the customers, right? So one of the things that OpenStack has provided, at least enterprise folks that we've talked to at SiliconANGLE, Wookie Bond is, they want to look under the hood. They want composite, they want Lego blocks. And so, I know you're talking to Rick Jackson, he promotes this open cloud concept, which essentially what OpenStack is. It's not a closed cloud, right? So we also had Boris on yesterday from Morantis, very vocal about behind closed doors, open source, whatever that means. And I think too that Open, Open gets thrown around a lot, right? And then what we have open cloud company has a tagline, right? But it opened to me, it's more than just open source, right? Is a mindset of, you know, I can, especially in the world of service providers, like Open in the sense that I can bring my workloads to you and I can easily, I'm not locked into you as a provider, meaning like we could offer, you can still offer proprietary software, be it a SQL server or Oracle, like in a cloud, because knowing that I can take my workload to you, but I can also take it in-house or I can run it with another provider, I'm not locked in, I'm open in that sense. So certainly open source is a major part of that. And we strive to be as open as possible. In many of the projects we work on, I mean, we have extremely liberal open source policies within our company because we want to help build these communities, we want to help be purveyors of openness, of open source. And I think it speaks well to, you know, if you just look at the success of OpenStack and where that's gone. What are we expecting at OpenStack Summit this year? We have theCUBE there live for multiple days in Atlanta. Brawl is going to be at Brawl, it's going to be Gumbaya, LoveFest, or more of the same. I think as you see the ecosystem build out, there's going to be more, I mean, obviously there's a lot of really high powered thinkers involved in the OpenStack initiative. And that, you know, that grows out opinions and it grows out camps of ideologies around that. I think if you look at any open source ecosystem, we see that in Hadoop. People starting to gravitate to certain kind of, you know, ethos of thinking when they're really looking at that. So I think what you'll see is, you know, continued commitment on the people that are no surprises. So the verantices and the rack spaces of the world. I think what you're going to see is a lot of discussion about, you know, what is the genesis of, you know, things like Icehouse and the newer versions of, you know, OpenStack look like. And for the other distribution providers, how do we provide feature parity, but also add value onto what just the core OpenStack framework is. A lot of big players in there, IBM announcing premier sponsorship. Obviously you guys are a big part of it. You got Red Hat, a huge contributor, kind of left out on the dance car with the Cloud Foundry, which to me signals some interesting conversations, which we'll see. But last year, you saw a lot of people up on stage at OpenStack with use cases. So it was very much, which I like, I hope there's more of this this year, but you had guys up there. It wasn't a big, you know, a marketing fest. It was people saying, hey, look it, we're going to show with code. And yeah, one of the litmus tests for us is, consistently when we go to these conferences, more and more questions about, how do I run data workloads on OpenStack? How do I run some of these more complicated stacks on there? So you saw things like Savannah come out. How do we develop some IP on how to architect the loop on top of OpenStack? We're consistently getting more, a lot of questions this year on Trove and how we're dealing with the whole database community on top of that. So that's us says that now people are asking, and they're real questions. They have real meat to them. They have real technology merit. So I think as we see more of those challenging questions, it just proves to us that people are not just on that kind of high level theory about what OpenStack can do. They're actually in there kind of getting their hands dirty. It's because people are, I mean, it's real. People are running it. People are scaling it. People are, there's constant improvements are going back into it. So that's why you're seeing these use cases. It's grown rapidly. And the value, when people see the value and they're displaying the value and showing that it is there. Yeah, open source always wins. We with Dave Alonso and I always talk about that. At the end of the day in this generation, open source always wins. However, there are a lot of motivated people like looking not to see the win. You see different approaches like SAP HANA, which it developed years ago. Where's the open source version of HANA? Maybe OpenStack won't have an element of that. You see IBM with DB2, but they're also involved. You have VMWare. So it kind of looks like to me in the 80s, 90s, the standards organizations are the place where things go to die. It used to be that way. Slow it down in the standards body. So I get a little nervous about that with OpenStack is that it becomes a little bit like, okay, let's slow this thing down with the religious debates around things. What do you guys, how do you guys respond to that? Give us some hope. You know, I think the whole reason in investing in OpenStack or one of the main tenets in investing in OpenStack is the agility of that. It's like we have an ecosystem of people contributing this code. Let's all work together to accelerate the adoption. I think that will determine the success of everything. So I think as long as the contributors still understand where the wheelhouses are and where everybody can add value, then I think that we can continue to work in a nice, healthy ecosystem. I think it would be concerning if we saw the writing on the wall that this wasn't happening. So quote on Twitter three hours ago, Peter Zeitzzi loves OpenStack is open source and it fits into the MySQL community. P.O.P.S. doesn't matter with local flash, Pocono live hashtag. Talk about the overlap between the communities. Obviously MySQL is under the hood. It's one of those things where people are building their engines of innovation around open source. MySQL is one of them. Whether you have your own version of sharding or you want to do whatever they want with that, gotten on persistent, get persistent flash now and with compression with Fusion IO, et cetera. Where's the overlap between the communities? Because obviously MySQL is a big part of what's under the hood with OpenStack. Well, I mean, there's, you look kind of at it, well, OpenStack itself, so let's take MySQL, like OpenStack itself, if you're deploying and running OpenStack, well, it's using MySQL on the back end to host most of the infrastructure databases that you use to scale out NOVA or scale out Trove, which is a database service. You have Trove, which is a database as a service, like operational tooling and software to run and scale databases, which uses MySQL. We have many people that have been people that are now at, you know, people are moving between companies, so people at HP that used to work on MySQL. For a time, we had, you know, Brian Aker straight from the MySQL community that was, you know, very heavily involved in what we were doing with Trove and pushing that forward there. So I see a lot of overlap between these communities and I think you take an open source vibrant community like MySQL and what it's been able to do and injecting a lot of those people into the OpenStack community and you're just seeing a lot of similarities in how those communities are growing and thriving. And you mentioned that, you know, just to answer your question from earlier, is things slowing down or are we losing steam? And I don't quite see that yet. I do think that, you know, we're still at a point where people are still moving to the cloud and for those that don't want to move to the cloud, well, they're going to private clouds and that's where OpenStack is, I think, just starting to pick up major steam as far as people looking for an alternative to, do I go to this cloud provider or that cloud provider? Maybe I'm not ready. I'll go deploy. They want flexibility. Yeah, one of the many companies, Morantis has private cloud Rackspace, we have a private cloud edition, like there are numerous opportunities for how you can actually take this in-house and leverage, you know, exactly what Rackspace is running to offer our cloud and that's powerful and I think people see that value. Okay guys, we're stuck on time here. I wanted to get you guys a final word. I like each of you guys to share with the audience out there. Why is Percona Live such an important event right now? It doesn't get the fanfare, the big glamorous events like at San Francisco where Microsoft's got their build conference which is about developers. That's a whole other segment by itself but it's a very tight community here. It's not a lot of flair. There's a revolution still going on with MySQL and we're still seeing cloud evolve and why is this show important? I think it's hugely important for us specifically to listen. We're really here to listen, to listen to the community, to listen to the ecosystem because the way that we're able to kind of craft our productized offerings or even decide what do we go out there and build next or who do we partner with to provide these services. It's really based on what the ecosystem is telling us and so if we have assumptions and we come out here and that's not what we're seeing in the community, we would rather shift our strategy to understand how can we give people the tools that they're asking for and so for us, it's very much a conversation and we're having conversations all day long with the people inside the ecosystem. It's just a way for us to get outside of our bubble and kind of put a lens on to really see what these people are seeing, talk to people like the bigger companies, the Dropboxes and the Etsy's to see how they're doing it at scale and then talking to the DBA that works at the small mom and pop shop to say what are your pain points and what are you running into and that will probably heavily influence where we go with our productized offerings whether they're Rackspace customers or just people we're talking to. Sean from a technical perspective, why is this important? The show. I mean Daniel, sorry. No problem. It just went, yeah. I mean from a technical perspective and I touched on this earlier that how vibrant this community is and that you can have core MySQL and multiple variants and forks of MySQL existing with Percona and MariaDB and I mentioned the web scale consortium that's kind of come together and there are, there isn't, we know as a community from a technical perspective there's more than one way to solve, more than one way to crack a nut to solve these problems and people here are coming together and figuring that out as a community. I think Peter in the keynotes yesterday he raised, had people raise their hands. How many people have been here for one year, five years, 10 years and to see that one there's new people showing up here. There are people that have been here every single MySQL conference has come that this is a community that is still growing, still evolving and still sharing great technical advice across. Guys, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate it. Of course, we were talking in the opening segment yesterday and today it's a data-first world we're living in and I think the revolution of MySQL is going to go to a whole other level as web scale, SQL as you mentioned, as it gives the big trend and it's interesting that people in the press release there are people that use data as a competitive advantage and I think that is the future model, that data-first will be a really big developer conversation and I think it's going to come out of the MySQL type communities where people are data-full, they're not data vacuums. So that's where you're going to start to see people who have the data, who use the data will be active participants in shaping the standards. I think that's going to come from the database side. So I agree 100% with you guys. Congratulations on your success with the OpenCloud. This is theCUBE, we'll be right back and of course we'll be covering the OpenStack Summit coming up in Atlanta. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, we'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.