>> Announcer: Live from Vancouver, Canada.
It's theCUBE covering
OpenStack Summit North America 2018,
brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation
and its ecosystem partners.
>> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and my cohost John Troyer
and you're watching theCUBE, the worldwide leader in
tech coverage and this is exclusive coverage from OpenStack
Summit 2018 in Vancouver.
Usually this time of year it is a little bit overcast, but
for the second time the OpenStack Summit has been here,
the sun is shining.
It has been gorgeous weather but we are in here really
digging in and understanding it
One of the people I have gotten to know through this
community especially, is our wrap up guest today,
Sean Michael Kerner, who is a senior editor with eWeek,
amongst other bi-lines that you have.
Pleasure to see you.
>> Great, good seeing you too Stu.
>> Alright, so we let you keep on the Toronto Bluejays hat
>> Thank you, there we go.
>> We have had quite a few Canadians on our program here.
>> Well, seeing as how you're here in Canada,
it's not all that surprising.
>> It's lovely.
They have you working on Victoria Day.
>> Yeah, that's unfortunate but I will take Memorial Day off
in a week, so it works out.
>> Excellent.
So Sean, for our audience that might not know you,
give us a little bit about your background.
You've been to umpteen of these shows.
>> Sure.
I have been with the same publication roughly,
I guess 15-16 years at this point.
I've been writing before there was cloud, core living
and Opensource stuff, networking.
And then through the magic of technology, I shifted
a little bit to security, which is a core focus for me.
I have been to every OpenStack Summit since
the San Diego Summit, I guess, 2011.
Somebody can correct me afterwards.
I did miss the Sydney Summit for various reasons, but
yeah, I've been to a bunch of these things, so interesting
to see how things have shifted over the years from nothing
to certain heights to where we are now.
>> Alright, so bring us up to that, as to where we are now.
Attendance is down a little bit.
They haven't been talking a lot about it
but quality I guess is here.
Sessions, they've broadened down a bit of the scope.
We have been digging into it, but want to get
your take so far.
>> Yeah, well it's like anything else, there are standard
hype cycles, as it were and
there's a trough of disillusionment.
I wouldn't call this a trough of disillusionment,
but when you get to a certain plateau,
people just, there'sn't as much interest.
In the early days, I remember the
San Diego Summit I went to.
They didn't schedule it properly.
They didn't know how many people they were going to have,
and they had to line up around the corner and stuff.
That was six years ago, but that is when OpenStack was new.
There was no such thing as the Foundation, and everyone
was trying to figure out what was what.
And, there was no clue at this point.
Cloud is a well understood thing.
There are competitive efforts or
complimentary efforts, as the Foundation would
probably like to put it; whether it's CNCF,
there's the public cloud and it's different.
There is, with all respect to the OpenStack Foundation
and its member projects, there's not as much excitement.
This in now a stable, mature ecosystem and because of that,
I don't think there's as much of a draw.
When something is brand new and shiny,
you get more of a draw.
If they would have put the name Blockchain somewhere,
maybe, maybe they would have had a few more.
They put Kubernetes in there, which is fine,
but no machine learning or artificial intelligence
quite yet, though that's a topic somewhere in there too.
>> Yeah, John, you've been making a lot of comments this week
talking about we've matured and the lower layer pieces
just work a bit more.
Give us your take about that.
>> Sure.
That's the way it seems.
There wasn't a whole lot of talk about the release,
news release, and all the
different components, even the keynotes.
But, the people we have talked to, both on the vendor and
the customer side, they have working
production OpenStack environments.
They're very large.
They require very few admins.
They work.
They're embedded in telecom and banking, et cetera.
It's here and it's working.
>> Yeah, that's so something that happened,
maybe three cycles ago at this point, because
they used to have the release the same time as the
Summit and the Design Summit.
It was together, so, there was essentially
a celebration of the release.
People would talk about the release and
then they desegrigated that.
I think that took a lot of steam out of the reason why
you got developers to attend.
So, when you don't have the Design Summit,
there's this separate open endeavor,
there's the forum, I don't quite understand
how that works here now.
There isn't as much momentum.
Yeah, I agree with you.
There has been very little talk about Queens.
In each of the project update sessions I have been to,
and I have been to a couple, there has always been a
slight on Rocky, what's coming.
I think we are on the second milestone of Rocky,
at this point, so there's some development,
but at this point it is incremental featurettes.
There is no whiz bang.
OK, we're going to have flying cars,
you know send a Tesla to outer space kind of Earth
shattering kind of news, literally,
because that's not where it's at.
It's just incremental tuck in features in stability
and that kind of thing.
>> Alright, you talk space and thinks like that
and it brings to mind a certain attendee of the program
that has actually been to outer space and maybe one of the
more notable moments of the show so far.
Give us your take on Mr. Shuttleworth.
>> Well, I'm a big fan of Mr. Shuttleworth, top to bottom.
Hey Mark.
Big fan, always have been.
He has his own opinion on things of course.
Usually in a keynote you don't tend to take direct aim
at competitors and he chose to do that.
It made some people a little uncomfortable.
I happened to be sitting in the front row,
where I like to sit, and there was some Red Hat people,
and there were some frantic emails going back and forth.
And people were trying to see what was going on et cetera.
I think, for me, a little bit of drama is okay.
You guys go to more shows than I do, and sometimes
you get these kind of sales kind of things.
But in an open community, there's almost an
unwritten rule, which perhaps will be written after
this conference, that whether or not everybody is
a business competitor or not, is that this is
neutral territory as it were and
everybody is kind of friendly.
In the exhibit hall, you can say this and that,
we are better, whatever, but on the stage you don't
necessarily do that, so there was some drama there.
Some of my peers wrote about that and I will be
writing about it as well.
It's a, I prefer to write about technology and
not necessarily drama.
Whether somebody is faster, better, stronger than others,
you let the number prove them out.
When we talk about Opensource,
Opensource Innovation without Canonical,
there probably wouldn't have been an OpenStack.
All the initial OpenStack reference and
limitations are on Canonical.
They got a number of large public clouds, as does Red Hat.
I think they both have their tactical merits and
I'm sure on some respects Red Hat's better and
on some respects Canonical is better, but him standing
up there and beating on the competition was
something that across the 13 summits I have been
I have never seen before.
One guy I talked to my first OpenStack Summit was in
San Diego and the CTO of VMware at the time came up to,
VMware was not an OpenStack contributor at the time,
they were thinking about it, and he was fielding questions
about how it was competitive or not and
he was still complimentary.
So there has always been that kind of thing.
So, a little bit of an interesting shift,
a little bit of drama, and gives this show something
memorable, because you and I and others will be able
to talk about this five years from now, et cetera.
>> You talked about something you would write up.
I mean part of your job is to take things back to
the readers at eWeek. >> Yeah.
>> What are the things, highlights you're
going to be covering?
>> The highlights for me, Stu and I talked about this at
one point off the camera, this is not an OpenStack Summit
necessarily, they're calling it Open Infrastructure.
I almost thought that they would change, we almost thought
that they would change the name of the entire organization
to the Open Infrastructure Foundation.
That whole shift, and I know the foundation has been talking
about that since Sydney last year, that they're going to
shift to that, but, that's the take away.
The platform itself is not the only thing.
Enabling the open infrastructure is nice.
They're going to try and play well and where it fits
within the whole stack.
That gets very confusing because talking about collaboration
is all fine and nice, but that is not necessarily news.
That is how the hot dog is made and that's nice.
But, people want to know what's in that dog
and how it is going to work.
I think it's a tougher show for me to cover than it has been
in past years, because there has been less news.
There's no new release.
There was Kata 1.0 release and there was the
Zuul project coming out on its own.
Zuul project, they said it was 3.0, it was actually
March was Zuul 3.03.
Kata Container project, okay,
interesting, we'll see how it goes.
But a tougher project, tougher event for me to cover
for that reason.
Collaboration is all fine and nice.
But, the CNCF CloudNativeCon KubeCon event two weeks ago,
or three weeks ago, had a little bit more news
and a lot it's same kind of issues come up here.
So, long winded answer, tough to come up with lessons
learned out of this, other than everyone
wants to be friends,
well some people want to be.
And, collaboration is the way forward.
But that is not necessarily a new message.
>> When I think about Kubernetes, we are talking about the
multi cloud world and that's still, the last few years,
where it's been.
Where does OpenStack really fit in that multi cloud world?
One of the things I have been a little disappointed
actually, is most of the time, when I'm having
a conversation, it's almost the, yeah, there's public cloud,
but we are going to claw
things back and I need it for governments, and I need
all of these other things.
When I talk to customers, it is I'm going to choose
what I put in my data center.
I'm going to choose how I use probably multiple
public cloud finders.
It is not an anti-public cloud message, and
it feels a little bit on the anti-public cloud mass.
I want to work with what you're hearing when you
>> talk to users? >> When I talk to users,
vast majority of people, unless it's something, where
there's regulatory issues or certain legacy issues or
private cloud, public cloud period.
The private cloud idea is gone or mostly gone.
When I think about private clouds, it's really VmWare.
We have virtualized instances
that sitting there. >> What's OpenStack?
>> OpenStack is fine, but how many are running OpenStack
as a private cloud premise?
>> Yeah, so what's OpenStack then?
>> When I think of OpenStack, Oracles public cloud.
Oracle is not here surprisingly.
Oracle's public cloud, Larry Ellison, who I know you guys
have spoken to more than once on theCUBE at various
points on Oracle World and other things.
Oracle's public cloud, they want to compete against AWS.
That's all.
OpenStack IBM cloud, all OpenStack.
The various big providers out of China are OpenStack based.
OEH is here.
So that's where it fits in is that
underlying infrastructure layer.
Walmart uses it.
Bestbuy, all these other places, Comcast, et cetera; ATT.
But individual enterprises, not so much.
I have a hard time finding individual enterprises that
will tell me we are running
our own private cloud as OpenStack.
They will tell me they're running VmWare, they will
tell me they're running REV or even some flavor of
Citrix end server, but not a private cloud.
They may have some kind of instances and
they will burst out, but it's not,
I don't think private cloud for mid tier enterprises
ever took off the way some people thought five years ago.
>> That's interesting.
Let's go meta for a second.
You talked about things you do and don't write about,
you don't necessarily write the VC's are not here
necessarily, but you don't write
about necessarily financial stuff.
>> Sometimes.
There was actually at the Portland summit, I did a panel
with press and analysts at the time and afterwards there
might have been four different VC's that came up to me
and asked me what I thought about different companies.
They were looking at different things
where they would invest.
And I remember, we looked at the board and one VC who
shall remain nameless, and I said you know what, we'll look
at this board with all these companies
and five years from now, three quarters
of them will not be here.
I think I was probably wrong because it is more than that.
There are so many.
I wrote a story, I don't remember the exact name of it,
but I wrote a story not that long ago
about OpenStack deadpool.
There are so, multiple companies that
raised funding that disappeared.
In the networking space, there were things like
Plumgrid, they mminorly acquired for assets by
Vmware, if I'm not mistaken.
There was Pivotal, Joshua McKenzie, one of the co-founders
of OpenStack itself, got acquired by Cisco.
But they would have collapsed perhaps otherwise.
Nebula Computing is perhaps, it still shocks me.
They raised whatever it was 50 odd million,
someone will correct me afterward.
Chris Kemp, CTO of NASA who helped start it.
Gone.
So, there has been tremendous consolidation.
I think when VC's lose money,
they lose interest really fast.
The other thing you have to think about,
from the VC side, they don't write
too much on the financial.
My good friend Fredrick, who didn't make it,
Where are you, Fredrick, where are you?
Does more on that funding side.
But has there been a big exit for an OpenStack company?
Not really, not really.
And without that kind of thing, without that precedence
it's a tough thing, especially for a market that is now
eight years old, give or take.
>> Even the exits that had a decent exit, you know
that got bought into the say IBM's, Cisco's of the world,
and when you look a couple of years later, there's
not much left of those organizations.
>> Yeah.
It's also really hard.
People really don't want to compete against, well,
some people want to compete against AWS.
But, if you're going to try to go toe to toe with them,
it's a challenge.
>> Okay, so what brings you back here every year?
You're speaking at the show.
You're talking to people.
>> What brings me back here is regardless of the fact
that momentum has probably shifted, it's not in
that really hype stage, OpenStack's core infrastructure,
literally, core infrastructure that runs important assets.
Internet assets, whether it certain public cloud vendors,
large Fortune 500 companies, or otherwise.
So it's an important piece of the stack, whether it's
in the hype cycle or not, so that brings me back,
because it's important.
It brings me back because I have a vested interest.
I have written so much about it so I'm curious to
see how it continues to evolve.
Specifically, I'm speaking here on Thursday
doing a panel on defending Cloud Counsel Security
as a core competence, a core interest for me.
With all these OpenStack assets out there,
how they're defended or not is a critical interest.
In the modern world, cyber attacks are a given.
Everybody should assume they're always
under a constant state of attack and how that
security works is a core area of interest
and why I will keep coming back.
I will also keep coming back because I expect
there to be another shift.
I don't think we have heard the end
of the OpenStack story yet.
I think the shift towards open infrastructure will
evolve a little bit and will come
to an interesting conclusion.
>> Alright, last thing is what's your favorite question
you're asking at this show.
Any final things you want to ask us as we wrap?
>> Yeah, my favorite, well, I want to ask you guys,
what the most interesting answer you got from all
the great people you interviewed because I'm
sure some of it was negative and you got mostly
positive as well.
>> Well, we aren't used to answering the questions Stu.
>> I'm used to being on the other side here, right.
>> Well, I do say we got a lot of stuff about some
interesting and juicy cases, like I say, the practitioners
I talked to were real.
I was always impressed by how few administrators it takes
to run a huge OpenStack based cloud once it's set up.
I think that's something interesting to me.
You asked some folks about a public cloud a lot.
>> Yeah, so it has been interesting.
For me, it's, we've reached that certain maturity level.
I was looking at technology.
What's kind of the watermark that this is going to come to?
We had said years ago, I don't think you're going to have
somebody selling a billion dollars worth
of distribution on OpenStack.
So, that story with how Kubernetes and Containers
and everything fits in, OpenStack is part of the picture,
and it might not be the most exciting thing,
but then again, if you watch Linux as long as most of
us have, Red Hat took a really long time to get a
billion dollars and it was much more than just Linux
that got them there.
This still has the opportunity to be
tooling inside the environment.
We have talked to a number of users that use it.
It's in there.
It's not that the flagpole,
we're an OpenStack company anymore because there really
aren't many companies saying that that is the core of
their mission, but that is still an important
piece of the overall fabric of what we are covering.
>> Exactly right.
>> Alright, we on that note, Sean Michael Kerner, we really
appreciate you joining us.
Please support good technology journalism because
it is people like him that help us
understand the technology.
I read his stuff all the time and always love chatting
with him off the record and dragged him on here and
Fredrick from Techron Show we are disappointed you could
not join us, but we'll get you next time.
For Jon Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, be sure to join
us for the third day tomorrow of three days
of wall to wall live coverage here
from OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver.
And once again, thank you for watching theCUBE.
(upbeat music)