>> Announcer: Live, from Vancouver, Canada it's the CUBE,
covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018,
brought to you by Red Hat, the Open Stack Foundation,
and it's ecosystem partners.
>> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and
my cohost John Troyer and you're watching the CUBE,
the worldwide leader in tech coverage.
Happy to welcome back to the program
long time friend of the CUBE back from the earliest days,
Randy Bias, Vice President with Juniper,
Randy, great to see you.
>> Absolutely, great to be back with you guys.
>> All right, so Randy, we've been talking about, you know,
community, and everything's going good
and attendance might be down a little bit
but how we fit in with containers and kubernetes,
and everything, so we expect you to
tear everything up for us and tell us the reality
of what's happening in this community.
>> I'll do my best (laughing).
>> All right, so before we get to the kubernetic stuff,
you're working on, we used to call it OpenContrail?
Which you were involved in before Juniper acquired it,
went through a rebranding recently, Tungsten,
which I was looking up, came from the word heavy stone,
give us the update from the networking side.
>> Yeah, so the short history is that
there was a company called Contrail,
and they created a software defined networking controller,
it was acquired by Juniper in 2012, 2013,
and then that was open sourced, so Juniper for a long time
was running with sort of two editions,
Contrail which was the commercial offering,
and OpenContrail which was the open source,
and then shortly after I joined Juniper,
identified that, you know, we really needed to
go back to the drawing board on the way that
we had organized the community,
and transition it from being Juniper-led
to community led, and so over the past year,
I spearheaded that effort, and then that
culminated in us announcing at the end of March at ONS
that, you know, OpenContrail was now Tungsten Fabric.
We renamed it, we moved it into the Linux foundation,
under its governance, and now Juniper is one of many
people of the community that have a seat at the table
for the management, both from a business
and technical perspective, and we're moving forward
with a new reinvigorated community.
>> Yeah, so networking sits at really the intersection
of this multi-cloud world that we're living in.
There's so many players trying to be there,
you know Cisco, really moving to become
more of a software company, when I interviewed
their number two guy at their show, he's like,
when you think of Cisco in the future,
we're not even going to be a networking company,
we'll be a software company.
VMware, of course, pushed heavy through,
then the Nicira acquisition, where does Tungsten fit,
kind of compare and contrast for us, where it fits
among some of these other offerings
out there in the marketplace.
>> Yeah, I mean, I think most enterprise vendors
are in a similar transition from being
a hardware to software companies.
We're no different than any of the rest.
I think we have a pretty significant advantage
in that we have a lot of growth in the cloud sector,
so a lot of the large public clouds are our customers
and we're selling a tremendous amount of hardwaring to them,
so I think we've got a lot longer runway.
But, you know, we just recently hired CTO, Bikash Koley,
out of Google, and we're starting to see some
additional folks out of Google, like my new boss, Morgan,
and what that's bringing with it is a very much
a software first type perspective.
So Bikash and Morgan really built everything
for the Google network from the topper rack
all the way out to the win and it's almost all
software-based, disaggregated, hardware, software,
opensource software running on top of white boxes,
and so that kind of perspective is now really deep,
start beginning to become embedded in Juniper.
And at the head of that is Tungsten.
So we see Tungsten Fabric as being
sort of a tool that we use to create, you know,
a global ubiquitous network fabric,
that anybody can use anywhere,
without talking to Juniper at all, without knowing
that Juniper's part of Tungsten, and then as they grow up
and they get to a point where they need multi-cloud,
they need federation, or they need kind of day two
enterprise operations, you know,
we have a commercial version and a commercial distribution
that they can use.
>> Randy, we talked a little bit about OpenContrail
and last year, at OpenStack Summit and moving it to
a more of a community based governance model,
and now that's happened with the Linux Foundation,
can you talk a little bit about the role of
opensource governance, and corporate governance,
and then foundations, and just going forward,
you know, what's an effective model for 2018 going forward,
for a foundation-led project and
maybe in the context of Tungsten Fabric,
and how is that looking?
>> Yeah, so again, OpenContrail's now Tungsten Fabrics,
might be new for some of the viewers,
lot of people still coming to terms with that.
And so one of the things that we noticed is that,
and when many people go and they say, hey,
we want opensource first, the AT&T's of this world,
part of what they're saying, one of the aspects
of being opensource versus we want to be one of many
around the table, we want to have a seat at the table,
we want to have the option to contribute code back,
and we want to feel like it's a group effort.
And so that was a big factor, right?
It was an opensource project, but it was largely
the governance was carried by Juniper,
all the testing infrastructure was Juniper, you know,
all of the people who made architectural
decisions were Juniper, all of the lead contributors
were Juniper, and so, going to Linux Foundation
was critical to us having a legal framework,
for the trademarks, the code, the licenses,
the contributor license agreements, are all owned
and operated by the Linux Foundation and not by Juniper,
so we basically have a trusted third party
who can mediate all those things
and create a structure, a governance small structure
where Juniper has one seat at the table,
and all the other community members do as well.
So it was really key to getting, to moving to that model
to increase people's interest in the project
and to really go the next level.
There just wasn't any way to do it without doing this.
>> All right, so, Randy, let's talk about OpenStack.
You were watching the keynote yesterday,
you were, you know, in the Twitter stream,
>> Randy: I don't usually watch keynotes, man.
>> Stu: But you know this community, so--
>> I do know this community (laughing).
>> Give us kind of the good, the bad, and the ugly
from your standpoint as to, you know,
where we've gone, you know, what's doing well,
and what you're frustrated as heck
that we still haven't fixed yet.
>> Well, I mean, it's great that we have
so much inroads amongst the carriers,
it's great that, you know, that there's a segment
that OpenStack has been able to land in.
I mean, at some points when I was feeling
particularly pessimistic on some days,
I was like, oh man, this thing's never going to go anywhere,
so that's great.
On the other hand, you know, the promise that we had
of sort of being the Linux operating center,
operating system of the data center,
and you know, really gaining inroads into
private cloud and enterprise,
that just hasn't materialized
and I don't see a path to that.
A lot of that has to do with history,
I'm not sure how much of that I want to go into here,
but I see those as being bright lights.
I see the Ocata containers effort and
sort of having this alternative structure
that's more or less like the umbrella structure
that I lobbied for while I was on the board.
So for several years on the board, I said
we need to really look more like
the Apache Software Foundation,
we need to look less like the Linux Operating System
in terms of how we think about things.
Not this big integrated monolithic release,
you need more competition between projects
and that just wasn't really embraced.
And I think that that, in a way,
that was one of several things that really
kind of limited our ability to capture the market
that we really wanted, which is the enterprise market.
>> Yeah, well, I know, and one of those sticking points
there that I've talked to you many times
over the years about is how do I actually deploy this?
You know, getting a base configuration and scaling this out,
simplicity is tough, getting to those environments,
you know, getting it up in two weeks,
is good for some environments, but maybe not for others.
>> Yeah, I mean I think there's sort of a spectrum, right?
At one end of the spectrum, you say hey,
I'm going to have a very opinionated approach
like kubernetes does, and we're going to limit
what we say we can do, you know,
we're not all things to all people.
And I think that opinionated approach,
like the Linux operating system worked very, very well.
And then other end of the spectrum is
we've got no opinion like the Apache Software Foundation,
and then it's up to vendors to go and cherry pick
the pieces they want and turn that into
some kind of commercial offering,
whether it's Hortonworks, or Thi-dare or Du-per
or whatever it is, the problem is that
OpenStack wound up in the middle where
it had the sort of integrated monolithic release cycle
which it still does, which started to be
all things to all people, and it was never
as great as it could be, so it's like
we got to support Hyper-V, we got to support VMware,
and as the laundry list of all things we have to support
grew longer, it became more and more difficult
to have a compelling, easy to use, easy to scale
offering that any enterprise could consume.
>> Randy, a lot of talk this week about edge computing,
with several different definitions, right?
But it does strike me that, you know,
there's a certain set of apps, that you write 'em
and that they live fine in a big public cloud,
and a big data center somewhere.
But there's a lot of hardware that's going to be living
out in the world, whether that's at the base
of a radio tower, or in a wall, or in my shoe,
that is going to be running hardware,
and is going to be running something,
and sometimes that something can be OpenStack,
and we're seeing some examples of it,
many examples of that already.
Is that an area of growth for OpenStack?
Is that an interesting part of how this fabric
is going to expand?
>> Well, I probably have a contrarian view here.
So, I spent a bunch of time at Juniper,
one of the things I worked on for a while
was edge computing and we're still trying to decide
what we want to do there and you know,
kind of to the first point you made is
everybody's edge is different, right?
Is it on the mobile phone, is it back in the data center,
the difference is that the real estate
gets more expensive as you move out, right?
And it's in terms of latency, and it's in terms of bandwidth
and it's also in terms of cost of storage and compute.
There's a move closer to the mobile device
that becomes progressively more expensive,
and so that's why a lot of people sort of look
and say hey, wouldn't it be nice if we can
get you out the closer lower latency and bandwidth and so on
but as we looked at it, a lot of the different use cases
it became really interesting in that,
it wasn't clear if there was that much value
between 5 milliseconds and 20 milliseconds, right?
I mean, that's pretty, either one's pretty close,
sure there's a lot of difference between 20 and a 100,
but maybe not so much between 5 and 20.
And so we kind of came to the conclusion
that at least for right now,
probably, the bulk of use cases
are fine with 20 milliseconds,
and what that means is that regional systems
like AWS's Lambda at the Edge, they're in metro,
those are probably good for most cases.
I don't know that you need to be on the tower,
I don't know that you need to be in the central office,
so I think edge computing is still nascent,
we don't know exactly what all those use cases are,
but I think you might be able to service most of them
from regional data centers, and then the question
really becomes what does that stack need to be
and if you have a regional data center
that's got plenty of power, plenty of space,
then it might be that OpenStack is a good solution,
but if you're trying to scale down onto the tower,
I got to have some doubts about whether
OpenStack can really scale down that far.
>> Randy, analytics is something we've been seeing,
the networking people used for many years,
at this show, starting to hear a lot of discussion
about AI and ML, would love your view point as
to what you're seeing in that space.
>> You know I have some friends who started off in AI
in very early days and he had a very pessimistic view.
He said, you know this stuff comes and goes, but
I'm actually very positive and optimistic about it
because the way I look at this is
there's a renaissance happening
which is that, you know, now ML is really available
to masses and you're seeing people
do really interesting things like,
we have a product called AppFormix,
and what they do is they take ML
and they apply it to operations and I love this
because as an operations guy, you know,
I used to have these problems in production
where something would go out and the first thing I'd do,
is I'm trying to do correlation and then
root cause analysis, like, what was the actual failure?
Like I can see the symptom on this end
and now I have to get all the way back to what caused it,
and the reality is that machine learning,
AI techniques and protocols can do all the heavy lifting
for operators very, very quickly and
basically surface a problem for somebody
to do the final analysis on.
And so I do think that ML and AI apply
to very specific vertical problems,
it is just a place where we're going to see
a tremendous amount of revolution in the next couple years.
>> All right, and that hits right at really
that intersection between kind of the developers
and the operators there-- >> Absolutely.
>> What are you seeing from an organizational standpoint,
companies you're talking to these days,
how are they doing adopting that change,
dealing with that, you know, often schism or
are they bringing those groups together?
>> Well, I think you remember that like in the early days,
I used bring my deck along and I would talk about
assembly line IT versus the robotics spectrum all of IT
and I would sort of make that sort of analogy
to sort of the car manufacturing process,
and I think what machine learning is really going to do
is take us to that next level past that right?
So we had the assembly line
where we have all the specialists,
we had the robotics factory where we had people
who know how to build a robots and software,
and it's really sort of like,
just churning out with a lot of people on the line,
and I think the next level after that is, you know,
completely fully automated applications
driving themselves, you know, self-driving applications,
and I think that's when things get really interesting,
and maybe we start to remove the traditional operator
out of the equation and it really becomes about
empowering developers with tools that are comfortable
and that leverage all the cloud era and stuff that we built.
>> All right, so Randy, you're credited with the
pets versus cattle analogy, what's the latest,
you were talking about some of the previous slide decks,
what's Randy Bias looking on down the road?
>> I mean, the stuff just comes to me, man.
I can't like predict, but the thing I've been talking
about a lot lately is services of platform,
I think we might've talked about that last time,
which is just this notion that if we look at
where Amazon's invested and what's interesting,
it's certainly not at the infrastructure layer
and it's really not at the PAS layer,
it's that thick layer in between with like
database as a service and NoSQL as a service,
and messaging service, and DNS and so on,
where you can kind of cherry pick those things
as you're assembling your own PAS for your application,
and I still think that's the area
that is under-discussed, and the reason is
is the people back into basically doing that,
building kind of the service as a platform system,
but they're not like going into it,
kind of like eyes wide open.
>> Yeah, so just following up on that last piece,
one of the criticisms I have this week is
when you talk about multi-cloud,
most of the people talk about, oh well people
are clawing things back to their data centers.
Juniper plays across the board, strong partnership
with Amazon, yet you're here, what are you hearing
from customers, you know, what do you see
as kind of the balance there and, you know,
the public cloud's role in the world?
>> I mean, they're still winning, right?
I don't think there's any doubt,
I haven't seen a decline back here talking about,
but we are starting to enter into the era of,
okay, this stuff is out there, and it's running,
but I need to find my governance model,
I need to understand who's using what,
I need to understand what it's costing me,
and that's the sign of the maturation process.
And so I think that, you know,
we saw in the early days of cloud,
people jumping the gun, creating compliance services,
and you know, SAS products that would basically
measure how much you're spending and think that
it's time for that stuff to come back in vogue again,
because the tool needs to be there for people to manage
these extended supply chain of IT vendors
which include the public cloud.
And I think that the idea that would claw them back
as opposed to like just see that as holistic part
of what we're trying to accomplish doesn't make any sense.
>> Well learned.
Well, Randy Bias, always a pleasure to catch up with you.
>> John.
>> John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, getting towards the end
of two days of three days of live coverage.
Thanks for staying with the CUBE.
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