(cheerful music)
>> Voiceover: Live, from Los Angeles, it's theCUBE
covering Open Source Summit North America 2017,
brought to you by the Linux Foundation and Red Hat.
>> Okay, welcome back here when we're here live
with theCUBE coverage of Linux Foundation
Open Source Summit North America in Los Angeles,
I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman,
our next guest is Arpit Joshipura,
General Manager of Networking the Linux Foundation.
Welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you.
>> Thank you, nice to be here again.
>> Always good to talk networking,
as Stu and I always say networking is probably
the most active audience in our community,
because at the end of the day,
everything rolls downhill to networking
when the people complain.
It's like "where the hell's my WiFi,
"where's the patent latency,"
networking SDN was supposed to solve all that.
Stu, we're still talking about networking.
When are we going to fix the network?
It's always in the network, but important.
In all seriousness, a lot of action continues
and innovation to networking.
>> Absolutely.
>> What's the update?
>> Update is very exciting.
So first of all, I can confidently say
that open source networking, not just networking,
but open source networking is now mainstream.
And it's mainstream in the telcos, in the carriers,
service providers, it's getting there in the enterprise.
And Linux Foundation is really proud to host
eight of the top 10 projects
that are in open source networking.
ONAP, ODL, OPNFV, Fido, you know,
the list goes on.
And we're really excited about each of these projects,
so good momentum.
>> We've been seeing and talking about it too,
we all, joking aside, the intro there, but
in all seriousness we've been saying,
we get better the network, it's finally happening.
Has it been a maturization of the network itself,
has it been industry force and what have been
the forces of innovations been?
OpenStack has done some great work,
they're not getting a lot of love these days
with some people, but still we've seen
a lot of production workflows at OpenStack,
OpenStack's still there, rocking and rolling.
New projects are onboarding, you see the telcos
getting business models around digital.
What's the drivers?
Why is network mainstream now?
>> I think it's a very simple answer to that, and that is
before 5G and IoT hit the market,
network better be automated.
It's a very simple requirement.
And the reason is very self-explanatory, right?
You can't have an IoT device on the call on hold
while you get your service up (laughs).
So, it's IoT, right?
And it is the same thing on 5G, a lot of new use cases
around cars or around low latency apps.
You need automation, and in order to have automation,
a carrier or a solution provider goes
through a simple journey.
Am I virtualized? Yes or no?
Am I using the building blocks of SDN and NFV?
Yes or no?
And the third, which is now reality,
which is, am I using open source to do it?
Yes, and I'm going to do it.
And that's the driver right?
I mean it's all-
>> Automation, when you started throwing out
a lot of TLAs, you talk about SDN and NFV,
we've got a four-letter acronym that we need to talk about.
The Open Network Automation Platform.
Why don't you bring your audience up to speed,
what that is, the news that you have this week.
>> Absolutely, so ONAP was launched earlier in 2017.
It's a combination of two open source projects,
ECOMP and Open-O, and we wanted to bring
the community together versus sort of fragmented,
and because our end users are asking
for a harmonized solution.
So we brought it together.
It was launched earlier this year as we talked about,
but the most significant thing is it has received
tremendous support from the member community.
So at OSS today, we just announced
that Vodafone has joined as a platinum member.
They will be on our board, and as you know
Vodafone is one of the top providers.
So if you add up all the subscribers
that are being influenced by ONAP,
they come to 55%.
So out of the 4.5 billion subscribers that exist,
more than 55% will be influenced by ONAP
and the work that happens.
That includes China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom,
all of the China, Bell Canada, AT&T obviously
who sort of was the founding member,
Orange, Reliance Jio from India.
So we've got, Comcast joined earlier in the quarter,
so we've got cable companies, carriers, all joining.
And to be very honest, I'll probably just give you
the list of all the networking vendors
that are participating here, and I've list
Amdocs, Cisco, Ericsson, GigaSpaces, Hua Wei,
IBM, Intel, Nokia, Tech Mahindra, VMware, ZTE,
Juniper, you know, you name it.
>> Arpit, I mean the long story short is--
>> Just cause they're involved does that mean
they're actually working--
>> They're active. Active.
>> we're not going to be critical on this.
>> But come on, even Cisco's involved
in the open source stuff, right?
>> They've very active.
>> We've had lots of guests on from Cisco,
Lulu Tucker's been on many many times.
We know the open source there,
but it used to be, networking was very proprietary.
Now, it wasn't SDNs going to totally change everything,
it's lots of different pieces, lots of different projects.
It kind of felt like the river slowly wearing down
the mountain as to this transition
from proprietary to open source.
>> I think what happened is if you just look
at four years back, it was proprietary.
Not because people liked it, that was the only game in town.
When the open source industry, especially in the networking,
and this is a hundred year old industry, telecom right?
When it came in in the desegregated manner,
hardware and software separated,
control plane separated from data plane,
all of that happened, and what happened suddenly was
each components started becoming mature.
So they're production-ready components,
and what ONAP and what Linux Foundation is
intending to do this year is trying
to bring all the components into a system solution.
So that it's easy to deploy, and all you have to do is
point, click a service, everything below it
will all be automated and integrated.
>> Well the telcos are under a lot of pressure.
I mean this has been a decade run,
over-the-top they've been struggling with that
from years ago, decade ago or more.
But now they're getting their act together.
We're seeing some signs, even VMworld.
Stu, Pat Gelsinger said 5G's the next big kahuna
in networking the next 20 years, you can validate it.
This is going to be a 20 year changeover,
so as the Linux Foundation, which essentially is
the organic growth engine for this community,
what do you guys see in that 20 years?
Cause I see 5G's going to create all these connection points.
IoT is going to be massive.
That's going to increase the surface area
for potential attacks.
We're seeing a networking paradigm that's moving
from old guards Cisco, Juniper,
and some of the names you mentioned.
They got to make some changes.
How are they adjusting?
What's going on so the next 20 years we don't have
more conflict and more identity politics.
>> I'll tell you one thing,
I come from a vendor community, right?
So I really appreciate the work they're doing.
Part of the reason you would have seen in the past
a vendor dragging their feet is because
of fragmentation in the community.
You as a vendor do not know where to put your resources,
people, and where you put your money.
What we're doing at the Linux Foundation
is starting to harmonize all that.
And once you do that and you have enough of a scale
and enough of a community, there is no shortage of people
and developers that the vendors are contributing to.
>> John: What's some of the proof points that you can share?
>> Okay, so ONAP,
from start to now,
about 1100 Wiki members already.
That means 1100 unique developers are joining the project.
Over 50 members.
We ran out of VMs,
I mean it's like that has not happened
in any project for over five years.
We had to fire up people more.
So you can see that...
And this is not just, these are competitors,
but if you step back and look at it,
they're competitors from an end user perspective,
but they're solving the common problem
in which they don't get any money.
They don't make any money.
These are things that absolutely need to happen.
The plumbing, the infrastructure, the orchestration,
the control layer, the data plane layer,
all of that need to just happen, it should just work.
And let them differentiate on top.
We are actively seeing
almost everybody participating significantly.
>> Stu, let's hear your thoughts on this.
You guys are both, I view you guys both as experts
and influencers in this networking ecosystem,
so I got to ask you both a question.
CNCF has gotten a lot of traction with funding,
sponsorships are off the charts,
you're seeing massive tractions, Stu,
where you also see that KubeCon Cloud Native,
but you have native clouds, I call them native clouds,
in Amazon and then soon-to-be enterprises
that want to run software-defined networking.
So the question is do you see the same kind of support
going for your group as CNCF's getting?
Is it just fashionable at this point, CNCF?
Why isn't the networking getting as much love
at least from a sponsorship standpoint.
>> Let's define love.
So if you define love as the 2017 ONS,
which is our largest networking summit,
we grew that 10%,
everything was off the charts.
The feedback, the content--
>> John: The attendance growth or sponsorships?
>> Attendance, sponsorships, CFPs were 5x oversubscribed.
Call for papers, for submissions, 5x oversubscribed.
So we had a hard time picking the best of the best.
ONS 2018 is going to be here in LA,
we've already started getting requests on, you know,
so we're the same boat.
>> So you feel good.
>> We feel good.
>> Not about this, like you're winning.
>> No, but I tell you--
>> There'll be positive numbers
we know from the hype scale horses,
Stu, answer your question and then maybe
you guys can comment.
So is it a matter of that there's more buzz
in positioning involved in the hype side of CNCF now,
and there's just meat and potatoes being done
in the networking world, Stu?
Cause you and I both know, if no one has nothing to say,
they've got to kind of market themselves.
>> So John, think back to five years ago,
how much hype and buzz there was around SDN.
John, you and I interviewed like Martin Casado,
he just bought for $1.4 billion, all these startups,
lots of VC investment,
so I think we're further down the maturity curve.
Now networking's always--
>> John: People going to work, they're doing their job.
>> It's real, it's in production--
>> It's funny--
>> It's not parb, I always say when you move
from PowerPoint to production, real things happen.
>> I always say, if there's going to be sizzle,
I better see some steak on the grill,
so what's happening is steak is cooking right now.
>> And John, so one of the things we say,
networking, no offense to all my friends in networking,
networking is never sexy.
>> Oh, come on Stu, networking is totally sexy.
>> I always say it's cool again.
>> Networking has never lost its edge.
>> It absolutely is majorly important,
but Arpit, take us in, you know,
Kubernetes is hot,
containers get a lot of buzz and everything.
Networking, critical piece of making sure that this works,
feels like, I think back to the virtualization days,
it took us 10 years to kind of solve those things
that that abstraction layer broke.
It feels like networking is further ahead than it was,
it's moving faster, we understand it's not something
that's just kind of
oh we'll let the networking guys get to it eventually.
Networking and security, which often has that networking tie
are front and center now.
>> Very good point, and I think what you have to also
sort of step back and look at is
what are the problems that need to be solved
from an end user perspective?
So the hardest networking problems
at the data plane control layers, check.
Next big problem that remain to be solved was
orchestration, data analytics, and things like that.
Check, solve, with ONAP.
Now the next problems that need to be solved are
containerization of enterprise app,
which is where Kubernetes and...
and then how does containerization work with networking?
That's all the C&I, the interfaces.
I would say next year, you will start to see
the interworking and the blend of these "hot projects"
where they can all come together.
>> Stu, you were there in 2010, I looked right in the camera
and said to Dave Vellante, storage is not as sexy.
And Dave called it snoreage, cause snoreage is boring.
(Stu laughs)
>> And at that time, the storage industry went on a run.
And we well-documented that.
Sexy is, networking is sexy.
And I think that we-- >> I call it cool.
>> And I just tweeted, 25g is a good indicator
of a 20 year run, and networking is the big kahuna
as Pat Gelsinger said in IoT, so I think, Stu,
I think it's going to be very apparent, sexy.
I just don't see a lot of amplifications,
so you don't see a lot of people marketing the sizzle.
I think, being done I would agree, but Stu,
there's more buzz and hype on the CNCF side than networking.
>> That's fair.
I think it is always as you said,
it's the initial phase of any project
that gets a lot of clicks and a lot of interest,
and people want to know about it.
A lot of the buzz is around, just awareness.
The classic marketing cycle, and I think we're past that.
It was therefore ONAP in January, we're past that.
>> Alright, so here's the question, final question.
So the steak is coming off the grill in our metaphor here,
what are people-- what is that product,
what's happening, what is the big deliverable right now
from a networking standpoint that people can bet on
and know that they can cross the bridge
into the future with it.
>> You will see a visible difference, you as in
an end user, an enterprise, or a residential consumer.
You will see a significant difference
in terms of how you get services.
It's as simple as that.
Why? Because it's all automated.
Network on-demand, disaster recovery,
video conference services.
Why did over-the-top players, why were they so successful?
If you need a Gmail ID, you go in, you get one.
It's right there.
Try getting a T1 line five years ago.
That would be six weeks, six months.
So with the automation in place, the models are converging.
>> So provisionings are automatically happening--
>> Provisionings, service, and then the thing
that you will not see but you will see
in the services impact, is the closed loop automation
that has all the analytics built in.
Huge, huge.
I mean, network is the richest source,
and by the way, I'll come back next year
and I'll tell you why we are cool again.
Because all of a sudden, it's like oh my god look
at that data and the analytics
that the network is giving me.
What can I do with it?
You can do AI, you can do machine learning,
you can do all these things.
>> Well, we're looking forward to it,
the eye of the storm is kind of happening now
I think in networking, Stu and I always have debates
about this, cause we see a lot of great action.
Question is, let's see the proof points,
you guys are doing some good work.
Thanks for sharing, Arpit, really appreciate,
General Manager of Networking at Linux Foundation.
It's theCUBE, more live coverage from Los Angeles,
the Open Source Summit North America.
I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, be back
with more live coverage after this short break.
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