>> Announcer: Live from Copenhagen, Denmark,
it's the CUBE, covering KubeCon
and Cloud Native Con Europe 2018.
Brought to you by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation
and its ecosystem partners.
(busy music)
>> Welcome back, everyone, live here in Copenhagen, Denmark,
it's the CUBE's coverage of KubeCon 2018.
I'm John Furrier, the host of the CUBE,
along with Lauren Cooney, who's the founder of Spark Labs.
She's been co-host with me two days,
two days of wall to wall coverage.
Stephan Fabel, Product Strategy Lead at Canonical,
is here inside the CUBE, and from San Francisco.
Again, welcome to the CUBE, thanks for coming.
>> Thank you, thanks so much for having me.
>> I've got to, you guys have been around the block,
you know about open source software platforms,
you get and do it for a while.
Interesting time here at KubeCon.
Kubernetes, Istio, Kubeflow, Cloud Native,
they've still got the brand name CloudNativeCon and KubeCon.
Modern application architecture's now in play.
I see this notion of an interoperability model coming in
that's certainly going to be a de facto standard.
People are already kind of declaring it a de facto standard.
It really shows a path to multi-cloud,
but also frees up developers
from a lot of the heavy lifting.
Lou Tucker from Cisco was saying
they don't want to do networking.
Let's just have that be infrastructure as code,
that's DevOps, that's what we want.
>> Stephan: That is exactly right.
>> What are you guys doing here?
What's the story with Canonical
and how does that fit into the megatrends?
>> Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of things
that we at Canonical always believe
to be one of the core sort of tenets
in our distribution of Kubernetes.
As you know, we've been very active
in this space fairly early on,
and have been an active distributor of Kubernetes
and a certified distributor of our version of Kubernetes.
Pure upstream, remain conformant to the main public clouds,
such as to enable that workload migration and mobility
from on prem up to any of the other providers
to accommodate all kinds of use cases, right.
>> You guys made a bet on Kubernetes, obviously, good call.
>> Stephan: Right. >> Right.
What's the progress now, what's next?
Because that's, the bets are paying off.
I saw Red Hat had a great bet with what they did
with Kubernetes, changed what OpenShift became.
You guys had a bet in Kubernetes,
what has that become for Canonical?
>> Yeah, so based on the pure upstream distribution
that we have, we really feel that enabling the ecosystem
in a standards compliant way
so that all of the landscape projects
that are part of the CNCF can be deployed
on top of Kubernetes, on top of our distribution
of Kubernetes in just the same way
that they would be developed or deployed
in any of the large containers of service offerings
that are out there
is one of the big benefits that our customers would gain
from using our Kubernetes.
>> What's your differentiator for the distribution
of Kubernetes that you have versus others?
>> Well, there's two.
The first one, I think, is the notion
that deploying Kubernetes on premise
is something that you want to do in a repeatable fashion,
operationally efficient with the right capex opex mix,
so we believe that there is a place
for Kubernetes as a product, just deploy it,
it works on any substrate that you've got available to you.
But then also, for mainstream America, right,
you may want to have a managed service
on top of Kubernetes as well.
We offer that, too, just a way to get started
and kick the tires and see where that takes you
as far as the developers are concerned.
Now, on prem, you will find
that there are a couple of challenges
when deploying Kubernetes
that are really the key differentiator.
The first one, I would say, is things
like integration into the storage that's local,
integration into the network that's local,
and integration into all of those services
that should be available in the Cloud Native
microservices architecture platform,
such as low bouncers, right, elasticity,
object store, etc.
The second, and most importantly,
because it is a key enabler
for those next generation workloads,
is the GPGPU enablement work that we're doing
with partners such as NVIDIA.
When you deploy the Canonical distribution of Kubernetes,
you actually get the NVIDIA acceleration out of the box
the way that NVIDIA envisions this on top of Kubernetes
and the way that it is, by the way,
being deployed on the public clouds.
>> You bring a lot of your goodness to the table
inside the Kubernetes distribution.
OK, what are some customers doing?
Give some use cases of some customers' Kubernetes,
what are some of the things that they're doing with it,
what's the early indication?
What's the feedback?
>> Sure.
We have a ton of customers
that are using our version of Kubernetes
to do the machine learning applications
and the AI of the next gen workloads
in use cases such as smart cities or connected cars,
where, when you look at self-driving cars, right,
as the next gen that's coming out of the valley,
they put in 300,000, 150,000, 400,000 miles a year
on the road these days
just optimizing the models that are being used
to actually take over one day.
Enabling those kinds of workloads in a distributed fashion
requires DevOps expertise.
Now, the people who are actually writing those applications
are not DevOps people, they're data scientists, right.
They shouldn't have to learn how to deploy Kubernetes,
how to create a container and all those things.
They should just be able to deploy the application
on top an attractive substrate
that actually supports that distributed application
use case, and so that is where we come in.
>> This is interesting, because what you're basically doing
is making an application developer
a DevOps developer overnight.
>> Stephan: That's exactly right.
>> That's really important.
I was just talking with the co-chair of CNCF.
We're talking about, Liz Rice and I were talking
about why everyone's so, like, excited here.
One of the things I said was,
because people who are doing DevOps were hardcore,
and they had to build everything from scratch,
and all the scar tissue.
But the benefits, once you got through the knothole there,
the benefits were amazing, right.
You go, okay, you don't want to do that again,
but now there's a way to make it easier.
There's kind of a shared experience
even though no one's met each other,
so there's kind of a joint community.
>> I agree.
I think it is increasingly about enabling developers
who are experts in their field
to actually leverage Kubernetes
and the advantages that it brings
in a more intuitive fashion.
Just take it up a notch.
>> How did the Kubernetes vibe integrate in with Canonical?
I'm sure, given the background of the company,
it probably was a nice fit, people embraced it.
You guys were early.
>> Stephan: Yeah.
>> What's the internal scuttlebutt
on the vibe with Kubernetes?
>> Oh, we love Kubernetes as a technology.
Ubuntu was always close to the developer
and close to where the innovation happens.
It was a natural fit to actually support all that workflow
now in this new world of Kubernetes.
We embraced OpenStack for the same reason,
and in a similar fashion,
Kubernetes has really driven the point home,
containerist applications
with a powerful orchestration framework such as Kubernetes
are the next step for all the developers that are out there,
and so as a consequence, this was a perfect match.
>> It's also a no-brainer if you think about it,
software methodology moving to the next level.
This is total step up function for productivity
for developers.
That's really a key thing.
What's your observation of that trend?
Because at the end of the day,
there's now Kubernetes, which does a lot of great things,
but one of the hottest areas is Istio service meshes,
and then you've got Kubeflow orchestration,
a lot of other things that are happening around Kubernetes.
What are you guys seeing that's important
for Canonical's customers,
what you're doing product wise.
Where's the order of operations, what's next?
What are you guys focused on, what's the priorities?
>> Well, our biggest priority right now
is enabling things like Kubeflow,
which, by the way, are also using Istio internally, right,
to actually enable those data scientists
who actually deploy their I workload.
We work very closely with Google
to try and enable this in an on prem fashion out of the box
which is something you can actually do today.
>> John: You guys are doing this now inside this.
>> We're doing this right now.
This is also where we're going to double and triple down.
>> This is actually your best practice, too,
if you think about it, you want to take it in house,
and then get a feel for it.
What's the internal vibe on that, positive?
>> Oh, absolutely.
I mean, we always saw infrastructure as code
and actually as intelligent infrastructure
as something that we wanted to build
our conceptual framework around, so very concretely, right.
We've always had this notion of composable building blocks
adding up to, sum of one being greater than two, right,
like those types of scenarios.
Actually using things like Kubernetes
as an effective building block
to then build out web applications that use things
like machine learning algorithms underneath,
that's a perfect use case for a next gen workload,
and also something that we might use ourselves internally.
>> Well, hey, that whole building block thing,
it's happening.
>> Stephan: Yeah.
>> News flash.
>> Stephan: Exactly, right?
>> I mean, it's almost a pinch me moment
for the people in the industry like,
oh my god, it's going to go to a whole other level.
How do you guys envision that next level going?
Beyond the building blocks, is it, I mean,
what's the vision that you guys have?
Obviously, infrastructure as code programmability, but now,
you're talking about infrastructure as code was great,
but now you've got microservices growth
coming on top of it, it's a services market now.
>> It is, it is.
I think that the biggest challenge
will be the distribution of the workloads, right.
You have edge compute coming along in the telco space,
you have, like I said, smart cities, right,
the sensors will be everywhere,
and they will feed data back,
and how do you manage that at scale, right?
How do you manage that
across various different hardware perspectives?
We have hardware platforms such as ARM 64 picking up, right,
and actually playing a very significant role at the edge,
and increasingly, even in the core.
We've always believed that providing that software
and the distribution of IS such as Kubernetes and others
on top of those additional architectures
would make a huge difference,
and that is clearly paying off.
What we see is, the increased need
of managing hybrid workloads across multi-cloud scenarios
that could be composed of different architectures,
not just x86, the future is not homogeneous at all.
It'll be all over the place.
All those use cases and all those particular situation
require that building block principle,
like all the way from the OS up to the application.
>> John: That's a great use case for containers.
Kubernetes, Istio, Kubeflow. >> Absolutely.
>> All stacking in line beautifully
from an evolution standpoint.
I've got to ask you a personal question.
I mean, I was at Canonical, great company,
I want to thank Canonical for being a sponsor
of the CUBE over the years.
We've had Mark Shuttleworth on the CUBE
had an OpenStack going way back when.
You guys are a great participant in the community
as a company and the people there been phenomenal.
You're new.
>> I'm new.
>> What attracted you to Canonical?
What was the motivating force?
What drew you in?
You're now running Products, a big job.
You've got a lot in front of you.
Obviously, it's a great market, so you're a great company.
Just share, just color and why Canonical,
what attracted you there?
>> I've always been a user of Ubuntu,
I've been a user since the first hour.
I've used Ubuntu in my research.
I did robotics based on Ubuntu way before it was cool.
I built all kinds of things on top of Ubuntu
throughout my entire career.
Working for Canonical,
which is a company that always exhibited great vision
into the future and great predictions into trends
that would prove to become true was just, for me,
something that was very attractive.
>> Their leadership has a good eye on the prize.
They had good 20 mile stare, as we say,
they can see the roadmap ahead
and then make either course corrections or tweaks.
>> Yeah.
>> Great, awesome.
Well, I mean, what's new there?
What's your, take a minute to explain
what's new at Canonical, role here at KubeCon,
what are some of the conversations you're having?
>> Yeah, so I mean, for us at KubeCon,
it's always been an important part of our outreach
to the community, great opportunity for us
to have great conversations with our partners in the field.
I think it is really about enabling the ecosystem
in a more straightforward way.
There's no better place to have those types of conversations
than here, where everybody comes together
and really establishes those relationships.
For us, it is about, again, enabling the developer
and really staying close to that innovation
and supporting that in an optimal way.
Yes, I mean, that, to us, is the role that we play.
You've got a lot of end users here who are building stuff.
>> Oh, absolutely, yeah.
They, I mean, I had a talk today about Kubeflow with Google,
and after the talk, lots of folks came up to me and said,
hey, how can I use this at home, right?
>> Sometimes with, whether it's timing, technology,
all the above, Kubernetes really hit it strong
with the timing, industry was ready for it.
Containers had a nice gestation period.
People know about containers. >> Stephan: Absolutely.
>> Engineers know containers,
know about those kinds of concepts.
Now we're at a whole other operating environment.
>> Stephan: Absolutely.
>> You guys are at the forefront.
Thanks for coming on the CUBE.
>> Oh, thank you, I appreciate it.
>> Stephan sharing the perspective, Stephan Fabel.
Running Product and Strategy for Canonical, building stuff,
this is what's going on in Kubernetes in KubeCon,
end users are actually building and orchestrating workloads.
Multi-cloud is what people are talking about
and the tech to make it happen is here.
I'm John Furrier with the CUBE.
Stay with us for more live coverage here at KubeCon 2018,
part of the CNCF CUBE coverage.
We'll be right back after this short break.
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