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>> Narrator: Live, from Santa Clara, California,
it's theCube.
Covering Open Networking Summit 2017.
Brought to you by The Linux Foundation.
>> Woman: Sure.
Um, so, yeah, as you were saying,
OpenDaylight really kind of kicked things off
from a open source networking standpoint.
I mean, there were certainly other
open source controllers earlier,
in sort of the market life cycle,
but they kind of never really made their way
out of the universities.
OpenDaylight was the first that really
had a lot of commercial participation
and uptake, kind of in the real world, so to speak.
Um, so with that, I think there was a lot of learning
that happened, both on the vendor's side,
with regard to open source, as well as
on the user side.
Um, and as the OpenDaylight platform
matured and started coming to fruition,
we started seeing a lot of other projects
sort of both below at the platform layer
as well as further up the stack.
So at this point, and we've been talking about this
quite a bit here at ONS, um,
we've been talking a lot about the whole
open networking stack that has sort of
come to fruition now.
You know, really low level stuff,
DPDK was just announced today.
Fido, which is sort of big data for networking.
Then all the way up the stack to ONAP,
which was just announced last month.
ONAP is a bringing together of
the ECOMP Project that was started by AT&T
and then they brought it to The Linux Foundation
and Open-O, which actually sort of
germinated within The Linux Foundation
with a lot of input from, um,
a number of small vendors, as well as
major carriers, particularly in Asia.
So, um, bringing those things together
at the orchestration layer,
and so now we've got this sort of whole stack.
Some of it, a lot of it is Linux Foundation projects,
some of it is other projects
with other open source foundations.
All of which we work with very collaboratively
across all those different projects.
>> Man: Right, right.
>> But at this point, we're really
kind of looking at how do we
enable people to consume this a little bit
more easily from the user side?
And then also from the developer side.
There are a lot of developers
who are involved in multiple different projects.
Which of course means that they're spread
very thin across all those projects.
And we're looking at how do we make it
a more feasible and scalable activity for them?
>> Right.
>> So for example, you know,
OpenDaylight is upstream of a lot of other projects.
There are a lot of other projects that have
a lot of dependencies on OpenDaylight.
So how do we streamline the release train
in such a way that, you know,
everybody gets what they need
at the time that they need it, so
they can do their releases on a timely basis
and so forth and so on.
And that just, you know, that makes things
a lot easier from a developer standpoint.
That also sort of naturally increases the,
improves the integration points between those projects
which is, of course, better for users.
>> Man: Right.
>> Um, so those are a lot of the things
that we have in motion
sort of across the Linux Foundation, um,
and I think that the other thing
that we've really seen over the last year
come to fruition is a lot of the early adopters
of OpenDaylight in particular have now
spent enough time working with
the open source community, either
through their vendors or increasingly
directly themselves, that they kind of get
this open source thing, and they
understand kind of what the processes are
and why we do things they way they do.
>> Right.
>> And so they're willing to take
a much more active role.
AT&T is a prime example of that.
They were working on ECOMP themselves internally,
and they, very quickly, came to the realization
that in order to scale it
as quickly as they needed to, I mean,
they were putting tens of thousands
of their developers through specialized boot camps, right?
>> Man: Right, right.
>> The networking people to become networking developers.
But at the same point, you just can't
push people through the system that fast enough,
nor can you hire enough people that fast enough.
And so that's why this has decided to bring it
to the open source community.
>> Man: It seems like there's kind of an acceleration
of carving out some piece of what was proprietary
and putting it out to continue the development
in an open source world.
>> Any "why", you kind of answered the question just now
in terms of there's not enough people.
But more interestingly, you talked about
some open source stuff just never gets going.
What are some of the real secrets
that make an open source project run?
>> Yeah.
>> Versus those that don't, or
you know, die on the vine.
>> Yeah. Um, there are a lot of different components,
of course, like with anything.
Some of it is technical, right?
Do you have the right architecture?
Is it one that can scale?
Is it extensible?
Are the right kinds of people involved in the project?
Is the project being informed
by the right kinds of people?
So if you go and build something
that nobody needs, either because
you don't have the right people involved,
or because you're not open to that feedback,
it's going to die on the vine.
So, you know, a successful project
really has to have a strong community around it.
And it's a--
>> Jeff: Chicken and egg.
>> Chicken and egg thing, right?
How do you get a strong community?
Well, you have the right processes in place,
but you also make sure that you have
the right people involved so that
they can build the right kind of thing.
And that they have the skills to do it effectively.
>> Right.
And then the other interesting trend we're seeing is,
The Linux Foundation is becoming kind of the hub
where you put these things, um, to grow,
and as you said, really to cross-pollinate
with the other open source projects
that have all these interdependencies.
>> And that seems to be an accelerating trend
as well, as least from the outside looking in.
>> Lisa: Yeah, no, it absolutely is.
And I think we learned a lot with,
with OpenDaylight and also with OpenStack.
You know, when OpenStack started,
and OpenStack of course is even older than
OpenDaylight, but when OpenStack started,
I think there was all kinds of euphoria in the industry
because open source was relatively new
to infrastructure, and infrastructure people,
it was like, "Oh, I can build everything
"that I ever wanted to build now!"
Um, and so there was this sort of
irrational exuberance about feature proliferation.
In some ways, kind of at the expense
of platform stability initially.
And at a certain point, the users, again,
started getting involved and said,
"That's great. We need the thing to actually work.
"At scale, in real world environments.
"Please focus on that."
And you know, that's the real beauty
and strength of open source, is
when you have users who care, and see
the possibility of a project,
they can be actively involved and
actively influence where the focus of the project
is going to be.
And that's how you get to something
that's going to be useful to people quickly.
>> Thank you.
>> Well, it'd be great to hear a little bit more
about how you--
on these, I'm always kind of mystified
as an analyst or a journalist or whatever,
when you see these things.
The press release comes out,
"ONAP is the new thing", right?
There's a new thing every week.
How do you ensure the success?
How do you get the momentum behind it?
I imagine there's a lot of stuff
that's been happening behind the scenes
for ONAP.
>> Lisa: Yep. We try not to keep it too behind the scenes.
It has always been part of open source culture
and what's proven to be a best practice is
openness and transparency of not just the code itself
but the processes around it.
>> Scott: Mhm.
>> Um, if people feel like they understand
what's going on, that things aren't being hidden from them,
that they can have a voice.
>> Scott: Right.
>> They're much more actively willing to participate.
So that's really kind of the key
to building any kind of community.
>> And how do you work with a big carrier, like,
I mean, the fascinating part about this for me
is for our viewers who don't know what
ONAP and ONOS and ODL are,
it's basically all this carrier software
that's becoming open source and
they're just putting it out there, saying,
"It's no longer our family jewels.
"Everybody can use it."
I mean, that's a big leap for an AT&T, you know?
Tell us how you work with AT&T or Verizon or
some of these big, gigantic organizations.
Like, they just hand you a thumb drive?
(laughter)
How do you get the intellectual property?
How's that process start?
>> In the case of AT&T, they reached out to
The Linux Foundation and said,
"We want and need to do this.
"Help us do it. We don't know how this works.
"Help us, teach us."
But it's very much a, you know, a big part of
the role of The Linux Foundation
in all of this project proliferation and so forth
is teaching people how to do open source effectively.
Because, again, it's not just about
throwing coders at a problem,
'cause you can do that inside your own organization as well.
It's understanding
how to do that in a collaborative manner,
how to carve off what parts to open source, 'cause
AT&T's ECOMP platform, not all of it
has been open source.
Some portion of it, the stuff that's
really important and proprietary
and is considered the crown jewels,
that has stayed internal, but they've shared
a reasonable, fairly large percentage of
the base platform with the open source community.
And learning to draw that line is an art.
And figuring out what is commodity
and really could and should be shared
with the rest of the world so we're not all
reinventing the same wheel.
>> Scott: Right.
>> But rather than having ten developers here doing that
and ten developers here and duh duh duh dah,
we can put 30 developers, all working together,
to get the same thing more quickly.
That shifted mindset can take a little bit of time,
a bit of education, and that's kind of part of
what The Linux Foundation brings to that process
of onboarding new open source projects.
>> Jeff: Right. And then on the other end,
I always think of Randy Bias.
He's one of our favorite guests,
Especially with OpenStack, and
he knows a couple OpenStack
Silicon Valleys ago, where he was somewhat critical
on the other end, saying we also have to
kind of reign things in, and you have
all this risks of stuff going all over the place,
and how do you kind of have some organization
at the top end because of successful growth
can drive a bunch of different agendas and
things can get forked.
It's not a simple thing to manage.
>> No, and we've tried different models
and different approaches within
different projects and we've learned a lot from that.
OpenDaylight was very much a,
you know, you guys figure it out, hands-off kind of model.
Other open source projects have been
very top-down, from their governant structure
to everything else.
Others, like Open-O are kind of in-between
where they did specifically set up
an architecture committee that was composed of
the leading members of the project
because, again, Open-O in particular is touching
the business layer of these carriers.
So they really need that architecture
to be meeting their specifications.
>> Right, right.
>> Sort of a lower layer, so it's a little bit less critical.
There are lots of different models and sort of
a gradation of top-down versus bottom-up and,
you know, let a thousand flowers bloom.
(chuckling)
There are pluses and minuses to all of them.
I think that we've been sort of learning
as we go through all of these different projects what works.
And different--sometimes it's worth
shifting the model and starting out one way
and shifting as you go along as the project matures, too.
>> Jeff: But the net-net, which I think,
you said at the beginning, is that
big companies are now really learning
how to operate effectively in this world,
in this open source paradigm.
It's matured way, way, way beyond what,
we used to always joke, years ago,
is a free puppy, you know?
(laughing)
>> You know, I mean, I think Tokus understand now
that it is, yes, it's a free puppy.
You still have to do lots of work.
I think that understanding is sort of
starting to trickle into the enterprise.
I still have, every time I do a briefing,
people will ask me to tell them
about my product, and I say,
"I don't have a product. I can't sell you anything."
I help bring together a bunch of building blocks
that you and your vendors can put together.
But I don't have a product.
And that, you know, that's a major mind shift
for, especially, enterprise IT,
where they're used to buying things off the shelf.
>> Right.
>> So larger enterprises, um, are starting again.
They tend to take their cues from the carriers
as things get proven out in the carrier world.
And so we're starting to see that
the same level of understanding and also,
drivers in large, especially very distributed
types of organizations, where they have 50,
a hundred, hundreds of different sites
around the world that they need to have
a centralized few of in some fashion.
And the only way they can get there is
with SDN and they have a very strong preference,
very clear preference for open source.
>> Scott: How big is The Linux Foundation now?
>> Lisa: By what metric?
>> Uh, people, I guess.
>> Lisa: Oh, people. Um...
We're a few hundred, no more.
But it's not just--we're not the ones
doing all the work, right?
We organize things. We help things happen.
We help teach people.
We provide the infrastructure. >> It seems to be growing
very fast, like new projects are being added and merged.
>> Lisa: But again, it's vendors
and it's users. >> Very grassroots.
>> Yeah. We help provide the ground,
the legal framework, and the technical
test facilities and things like that,
and kind of the organizational guide rails.
But we're here to help, we're not the ones doing the work.
>> Right, right. Alright, Lisa,
so I'll give you the last word before we
sign off here.
As you look forward to 2017, what are some of your
top priorities for this next year?
>> Lisa: Yeah, so, several things.
First order is really enabling our users
to really be successful with the projects
that they already have in hand.
In many cases, they're well through
the phase of proof of concept
and all the way onto production,
and we just want to make sure that they're
continuing to get everything they want
out of the project and supporting them
and supporting their vendors.
And really building out the commercial ecosystem
around it, so that they have a strong base of support.
So that's one thing.
Certainly on the OpenDaylight side,
with some of the newer projects,
it's really about figuring out what are the best practices
that we can implement for this project,
for this project, and for this project
in order to make sure that they're successful.
And a lot of that, again, is that whole
harmonization effort that we have going on.
>> Right, right.
Alright, Lisa Caywood. She knows all about
bringing open source to the enterprise,
and thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day.
>> Thank you very much for having me.
>> Absolutely.
I'm Jeff Frick, he's Scott Raynovich.
You're watching theCube from Open Networking Summit 2017
in Santa Clara, California.
We'll be back after the short break.
Thanks for watching.
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