(soft electronic music)
>> Announcer: Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE.
Covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018.
Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation,
and it's ecosystem partners.
>> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman here
with my cohost John Troyer and you're watching
theCUBE's exclusive coverage of OpenStack
Summit 2018 in Vancouver.
Happy to welcome you back to the program,
off the keynote stage this morning,
Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical.
Thank you so much for joining us.
>> Stu, thanks for the invitation.
>> Alright, so you've been involved
in this OpenStack stuff for quite a bit.
>> Right, since the beginning.
>> I remember three years ago we were down
in the other hall talking about
the maturity of the platform.
I think three years ago, it was like
this container thing was kind of new
and the basic infrastructure stuff
was starting to get, in a nice term, boring.
Because that meant we could go about business
and be on the buzz of there's this cool new thing
and we're going to kill Amazon, kill VMware,
whatever else things that people thought
that had a misconceived notion.
So bring us forward to where we are 2018,
what you're hearing from customers
as you look at OpenStack and this community.
>> Well, I think you pretty much called it.
OpenStack very much now is about solving
a real business problem, which is the automation
of the data center and the cost parody
of private data centers with public data centers.
So I think we're at a time now
where people understand the public cloud
is a really good thing.
It's great that you have these giant companies
dueling it out to deliver better quality
infrastructure at a better price.
But then at the same time, having your own
private infrastructure that runs
cost-effectively is important.
And OpenStack really is the only approach
to that that exists today.
And it's important to us that the conversation
is increasingly about what we think really matters,
which is the economics of owning it,
the economics of running it, and how people
can essentially keep that in line
with what they get from the public cloud providers.
>> Yeah, one of the barometers I use
for vendors these days is in this multi-cloud world,
where do you sit?
Do you play with the HyperScalers?
Are you a public cloud denier?
Or, like most people you're, most people
are somewhere in-between.
In your keynote this morning, you were talking
a bit about all of the HyperScalers that use your products
as well as--
>> Ubuntu is at the heart of all of the major
public cloud operations at multiple levels.
So we see them as great drivers of innovation,
great drivers of exposure of Ubuntu into the enterprise.
We're still, by far, the number one platform
used in public cloud by enterprises.
It's hard to argue that public cloud is testing Dev now.
It really, really isn't and so most of that
is still Ubuntu.
And now we're seeing that pendulum swing,
all of those best practices, that consumption
of Ubuntu, that understanding of what a leaner,
meaner Enterprise Linux looks like.
Bringing that back to the data center is exciting.
For us, it's an opportunity to help
enterprises rethink the data center
to make it fully automated from the ground up.
OpenStack is part of that, Kubernetes is part of that
and now the cherry on top is really AI
where people understand they have to be able to do it
on public cloud, on private infrastructure
and at the Edge.
>> Mark, I wanted to talk about open source.
Marketing open source, for a minute.
We are obviously here, we're part
of an open source community.
Open source, defacto, has won
the cloud technology stack wars.
So there's one way of selling OpenStack
where you pound on open a lot.
>> I'm always a bit nervous about projects that put open.
It sounds like they're sort of trying
to gloss over something or wash over something
or prove a point.
They shouldn't have to.
>> There's one about the philosophy of open source,
which certainly has to stay there, right.
Because that's what drove the innovation
but I was kind of impressed about on the stage today,
you talked about the benefits.
You didn't say, well the venture's open.
You said, well, we're facilitating these benefits.
Speed to market, cost, et cetera.
Can you talk about your approach, Canonical's approach
to talking about this open source product
in terms of its benefits?
>> Sure, look, open source is a license.
Under that license, there's room for a huge
spectrum of interest and opinions and approaches.
And I'd say that I certainly see
an enormous amount of value in what I would call
the passion-based open source story.
Now, OpenStack is not that.
It's too big, too complicated,
to be one person's deep passion.
It really isn't.
But there's still a ton of innovation that happens
in our world, across the full spectrum
of what we see with open source, which is really experts
trying to do something beautiful and elegant.
And I still think that's really important in open source.
You also have a new kind of dimension,
which is almost like industrial
trench warfare with open source.
Which is huge organizations leveraging effectively
their ability go get something widespread,
widely adopted, quickly and efficiently
by essentially publishing it as open source.
And often, people get confused between these
two ends of the spectrum.
There's a bunch in between.
What I like about OpenStack is that I think
it's over the industrial trench warfare phase.
You know, you just don't see a ton of people
showing up here to throw parties
and prove to everyone how cool they are.
They've moved on to other open source projects.
The people who are here are people who essentially
have the real problem of I want to automate
my data center, I want to have, essentially,
a cloud that runs cost-effectively in my data center
that I can use as part of a multi-cloud strategy.
And so now I think we're in to that sort of,
a more mature place with OpenStack.
We're not either sort of artisan or craftsmen oriented,
nor are we a guns blazing brand oriented.
It's kind of now just solving the problems.
>> Mark, there's still some nay-sayers
out in the marketplace.
Either they say that this never matured,
there's a certain analyst firm that put out
a report a couple of months ago that,
it kind of denigrated what's happening here.
And then there's others that, as you said,
off chasing that next big wave of open source.
What are you hearing from your customers?
You've got a good footprint around the globe.
>> So that report is nonsense, for a start.
They're always wrong, right.
If they're hyping something, they're wrong
and if they're dissing something
then they're usually wrong too.
>> Stu: They have a cycle for that, I believe.
(chuckling)
>> Exactly.
Selling gold at the barroom.
Here's how I see it.
I think that enterprises have a real problem,
which is how do they create private cloud infrastructure.
OpenStack had a real problem in that it had
too many opinions, too many promises.
Essentially a governing structure
not a leadership structure.
Our position on this has always been
focus on the stuff that is really necessary.
There was a ton of nonsense in OpenStack
and that stuff is all failing.
And so what?
It was never essential to the mission.
The mission is stand up a data center
in an automated way, provide it, essentially,
as resources, as a service to everybody
who you think is authorized to be there, effectively.
Segment and operate that efficiently.
There's only a small part of OpenStack
that was ever really focused on that.
That's the stuff that's succeeding,
that's the stuff we deliver.
That's the stuff, we think very carefully
about how to automate it so that, essentially,
anybody can consume it at reasonable prices.
Now, we have learned that it's better for us
to do the operations almost.
It's better for us actually to take it to people
as a solution, say look, explain your requirements
to us then let us architect that cloud with you
then let us build that cloud then let us operate that cloud.
Until it's all stable and the economics are good,
then you can take over.
I think what we have seen is that you ask every single
different company to build OpenStack, they will make
a bunch of mistakes and then they'll say
OpenStack is the problem.
OpenStack's not the problem.
Because we do it again and again and again,
because we do it in many different data centers,
because we do it with many different industries,
we're able to essentially put it on rails.
When you consume OpenStack that way it's super cheap.
These aren't my numbers, analysts have studied
the costs of public infrastructure,
the cost of the established, incumbent enterprise,
virtualization solutions and so on.
And they found that when you consume OpenStack
from Canonical it is much, much cheaper
than any of your other options
in your own private data center.
And I think that's a success
that OpenStack should be proud of.
>> Alright, you've always done a good job
at poking at some of the discussions
happening in the industry.
I wouldn't say I was surprised
but you were highlighting AI as something
that was showing a lot of promise.
People have been a little hot and cold
depending on what part of the market you're at.
Tell us about AI and I'd love
to hear your thoughts in general.
Kubernetes, Serverless, and ask you
to talk about some of those new trends that are out there.
>> Sure, the big problem with data science
was always finding the right person
to ask the right question.
So you could get all the data in the world
in a data lake but now you have to hire somebody
who instinctively has to ask the right question
that you can test out of that data.
And that's a really hard problem.
What machine learning does is kind of inverts the problem.
It says, well, why don't we put all that data
through a pattern matching system
and then we'll end up with something
that reflects the underlying patterns,
even if we don't know what they are.
Now, we can essentially say if you saw this,
what would you expect?
And that turns out to be a very powerful way
to deal with huge amounts of data that, previously,
you had to kind of have this magical intuition
to kind of get to the bottom of.
So I think machine learning is real,
it's valuable in almost every industry,
and the challenges now are really
about standardizing underlying operations
so that the people who focus on the business problems
can, essentially, use them.
So that's really what I wanted to show today
is us working with, in that case it was Google,
but you can generalize that.
To standardize the experience for an institution
who wants to hire developers, have them effectively
build machine-driven models if they can then
put those into production.
There's a bunch of stuff I didn't show that's interesting.
For example, you really want to take the learnings
from machine-learning and you want
to put those at the Edge.
You want to react to what's happening
as close to where it's happening as possible.
So there's a bunch of stuff that we're working on
with various companies.
It's all about taking that AI outcome
right to the Edge, to IOT, to Edge Cloud
but we don't have time to get in to all of that today.
>> Yeah, and Ubuntu is at the Edge, on the mobile platform.
>> So we're in a great position that we're on the Cloud.
Now you see what we're doing in the data center
for enterprises, effectively recrafting
the data center has a much leaner, more automated machine.
Really driving down the cost of the data center.
And yes, we're on the higher-end things.
We're never going to be on the LightBulb.
We're a full general-purpose operating system.
But you can run Ubuntu on a $10 board now
and that means that people are taking it everywhere.
Amazon, for example, put Ubuntu on the DeepLens
so that's a great example of AI at the edge.
It's super exciting.
>> So the Kubernetes, Serverless-type applications,
what are your thinkings around there?
>> Serverless is a lovely way to think
about the flow of code in a distributed system.
It's a really nice way to solve certain problems.
What we haven't yet seen is we haven't seen
a Serverless framework that you can port.
We've seen great Serverless experiences
being built inside the various public clouds
but there's nothing consistent about them.
Everything that you invest in a particular place
is very useful there but you can't imagine
taking that anywhere else.
I think that's fine.
>> Stu: Today's primarily Lando.
>> And I think the other clouds
have done a credible job of getting there quickly.
But kudos to Amazon for kind of pioneering that.
I do think we'll see generalized Serverless,
it just doesn't exist at the moment
and as soon as it does we'll be itching
to get it into people's hands.
>> Okay, yeah?
>> Well, I just wanted to pull out
something that you had said in case people miss it,
you talked about managed OpenStack.
And that, I think, managed Kubernetes
has been a trend over the last year.
Managed OpenStack now.
Has been trans-- >> With these complex pieces
of infrastructure, you could easily drown
in learning it all and if you're only ever
going to do one, maybe it makes sense
to have somebody else do it for a while.
You can always take it over later.
So we're unusual in that we will essentially
standup something complex like an OpenStack
or a Kubernetes, operate it as long as people want
and then train them to take over.
So we're not exclusively managed
and we're not exclusively arms-length.
We're happy to start the one way and then hand over.
>> I think that's an important development, though,
that's been developing as the systems get more complicated.
One UNIX admin needs a whole new skill set
or broader skill set now that we're orchestrating
a whole cloud so that's, I think that's great.
And that's interesting.
Anything else you're looking forward to,
in terms of operation models.
I guess we've said, Ubuntu everywhere
from the edge to the center and now managed, as well.
Anything else we're looking at in terms
of operators should be looking at?
>> Well, I think it just is going to stay
sort of murky for a while simply because
each different group inside a large institution
has a boundary of their authority
and to them, that's the edge.
(chuckling)
And so the term is heavily overloaded.
But I would say, ultimately, there are a couple
of underlying problems that have to be solved
and if you look at the reference architectures
that the various large institutions are putting out,
they all show you how they're trying to attack
these patterns using Ubuntu.
One is physical provisioning.
The one thing that's true with every Edge deployment
is there are no humans there.
So you can't kind of Band-Aid over the idea
that when something breaks you need
to completely be able to reset it from the ground up.
So MAAS, Middle as a Service, shows up
in the reference architectures from AT&T
and from SoftBank and from Dorich Telecom
and a bunch of others because it solves their problem.
It's the smallest piece of software
you can use to take one server or 10 servers
or 100 servers and just reflash them
with Windows or CentOS or whatever you need.
That's one thing.
The other thing that I think is consistently true
in all these different H-Cloud permutations
or combinations is that overhead's really toxic.
If you need three nodes of overhead
for a hundred node OpenStack, it's 3%.
For a thousand node OpenStack, it's .3%.
It's nothing, you won't notice it.
If you need three nodes of OpenStack
for a nine node Edge Cloud, well then
that's 30% of your infrastructure costs.
So really thinking through how to get
the overhead down is kind of a key for us.
And all the projects with telcos in particular
that we're working, that's really what we bring
is that underlying understanding and some of those
really lightweight tools to solve those problems.
On top of that, they're all different, right.
Kubenetes here, Lixti there, OpenStack on the next one.
AI everywhere.
But those two problems, I think,
are the consistent things we see
as a pattern in the Edge.
>> Alright, so Mark, last question I have for you.
Company update.
So last year we talked a little bit about focusing,
where the company's going, talked a bit
about the business model and you said to me,
"Developers should never have to pay for anything."
It's the governance people and everything like that.
Give us the company update, everything from rumors
from hey, maybe you're IPO-ing
to what's happening, what can you share?
>> Right, so the twin areas of focus,
IOT and cloud infrastructure.
IOT continues to be an area of R and D for us
so we're still essentially underwriting an IOT investment.
I'm very excited about that.
I think it's the right thing to be doing at the moment.
I think IOT is the next wave, effectively,
and we're in a special position.
We really can get down, both economically
and operationally, into that sort
of small itch kind of scenario.
Cloud, for us, is a growth story.
I talked a little bit about taking Ubuntu
and Canonical into the finance sector.
In one year, we closed deals with 20%
of the top 20 banks in the world
to build Ubuntu base and open infrastructure.
That's a huge shift from the traditional
dependence exclusively on VMware Red Hat.
Now, suddenly, Ubuntu's in there, Canonical's in there.
I think everybody understands that telcos
really love Ubuntu and so that continues to grow for us.
Commercially, we're expanding both
in Emir and here in the Americas.
I won't talk more about our corporate plans
other than to say I see no reason
for us to scramble to cover any other areas.
I think cloud infrastructure and IOT
is plenty for one company.
For me, it's a privilege to combine
that kind of business with what happens
in the Ubuntu community.
I'm still very passionate about the fact
that we enable people to consume free software and innovate.
And we do that without any friction.
We don't have an enterprise version of Ubuntu.
We don't need an enterprise version of Ubuntu,
the whole thing's enterprise.
Even if you're a one-person startup.
>> Mark Shuttleworth, always a pleasure to catch up.
Thank you so much for joining us.
>> Mark: Thank you, Stu.
>> For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman.
Back with lots more coverage here
from OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver.
Thanks for watching theCUBE.
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