>> 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 to theCUBE's coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018
here in Vancouver.
I'm Stu Miniman with my cohost, John Troyer.
And happy to welcome back to the program,
fresh off the keynote stage, Mark Collier,
who's the chief operating officer
of the OpenStack Foundation.
>> Thank you.
Thanks for having me back.
>> Thank you for having us back and thank you again
for doing the show in Vancouver, so--
>> Oh man, such an amazing place.
Like this convention center,
I don't think it's fair to call it a convention center
because it's like a work of art, you know?
>> And it's my second time here for this show,
and I think kudos to your team
because you have good enough content
that people aren't just wandering around,
taking pictures of the mountains.
My wife is off seizing the whale watching right now,
but everybody else here, they're engaged.
And that's what you want in the community.
>> Yeah, definitely.
I guess you have to make sure you don't
lose their attention to the whales and the sea planes,
but so far everyone seems to be gettin' down to business.
>> You know, I think it would be fair to say
that there's some transitions going on
in the marketplace in general,
and at this show I notice when I got the invitation,
it's like the OpenStack slash open infrastructure summit.
Got a big track on edge computing,
got another one on containers,
been talking about containers for a few years at this show,
which really interesting to talk about.
And I mean, the edge stuff,
we were talking about it as NFV
and the telcos and all that stuff in the past.
What is the OpenStack Summit these days, Mark?
>> Yeah, I mean I think that it's evolving
to reflect what people are doing with open source
when it comes to infrastructure.
And so we call it open infrastructure,
but basically it's just a world of possibilities
have been opened up by, of course, OpenStack,
but also many, many other components,
some of which came before like Linux and things like that,
and some of which started after,
like Kubernetes, and there's many other examples,
TensorFlow for AI machine learning.
So there's kind of this like embarrassment of riches
these days if yo want to automate your infrastructure
in a cloud-like fashion.
You can do so many more things with it,
and OpenStack solves a very specific,
very important layer which is that kind of
traditional infrastructure as a service layer,
compute storage and networking.
But once you automate that,
it's proven, it's reliable,
you could run millions of cores with it
like some of our users are doing.
You want to do more and that means
layering other things on top
or sort of connecting them in different ways.
So just trying to help users get something
more out of the technology is really what we're about
and OpenStack becomes like an enabler
rather than kind of like the whole conversation.
Yeah, one of the things I always say in this industry,
sometimes we just don't have the right expectations
going into these environments.
You know, when I think back 15 years ago
as to what we thought Linux was going to do.
Oh it's going to crush Microsoft.
It's like, well, Microsoft is still doing quite well
and Linux has done phenomenal.
We wouldn't have companies like,
Google if it wasn't for the likes of Linux.
In an open source you've got a lot of tools out there.
So while there are the CERNs and Walmarts of the world
that take a full OpenStack distribution
and put out tons of cores,
I've run into software companies where
when I dig into their IP, oh what do ya know,
there's a project from OpenStack in there
that enables what they're doing.
So I've seen at a lot of shows
they're like, there's companies that are like,
yes, I want it, and then there's like,
oh no, there's this piece of it I want,
there's that piece what I want.
And that's kind of the wonder of OpenStack
that I can do all of those things.
>> Yeah exactly.
I think we've talked before about
sort of calling it composable open infrastructure,
and making, OpenStack's always been architecturally designed
from, in terms of the goals around it,
to be pluggable so from the beginning
you could plug multiple hypervisors kind of underneath
and you could plug different backends
for storage and networking,
so that sort of concept of being something,
integration engine that plugs things in
is part of the OpenStack kind of philosophy,
but now you see that the OpenStack services themselves
are sort of, you can think of them as microservices,
and like if you just need block storage you can use sender.
And that may make sense for some specific environments,
and are you running OpenStack?
Well, you are, but it gets a little bit fuzzy
in terms of are you running all of it or part of it?
And the reality is the things are not as simple
as a binary yes or no.
It's just that the options are much greater now.
>> Well Mark, that has been some of the discussion
in the community over the last few years,
the core versus the big tent,
and now of course with all this interoperability,
conversations with both OpenStack
participating in other communities
and other communities here today, this week.
I mean, what's the current state of that conversation
about what is OpenStack and how does it interrelate?
I think you kind of touched on it with this composable idea.
>> Yeah, I mean I think that basically it's kind of like
OpenStack is as OpenStack does, you know?
So what are people doing with it
and that tells you kind of what it is
and what people are doing with it.
There are a lot of different patterns.
There's no like one specific deployment pattern
that everyone uses,
but probably by and large, by far the most common pattern
is OpenStack plus Kubernetes.
And so when you talk about the interop piece,
this is a really good example where OpenStack has evolved
to become a better, kind of better citizen, I guess,
of open infrastructure by having more reliable APIs,
kind of being a target that tools
that build on top can rely on
and not sort of have to worry about
the snowflakes of different clouds
and there's still more work to be done in that area,
but we talked about OpenLab,
which is an initiative, this morning,
that puts together OpenStack, Kubernetes,
and other pieces like Terraform and things like that,
and does constant end-to-end testing on it,
and that's really how you make sure
that you know kind of what combinations work well together,
and sometimes you just find bugs,
and it turns out a couple of changes
need to be made upstream in Kubernetes
or in OpenStack or in gophercloud or in Terraform,
and just if you don't know, then the user kind of
with the some assembly required model,
finds out and they're like, I don't know,
it doesn't work, it's broken.
Well, is it OpenStack's fault or Kubernetes's fault,
and they don't, they just want it to work.
>> So you're saying >> Identified upstream
we can fix it.
>> You're saying OpenStack has become more of a stable layer
of the (mumbles).
>> Yes exactly, yes.
It has become a much more stable layer.
>> Which means there wasn't a whole lot of
flashy storage network and compute up on stage actually.
>> A lot of the talk-- >> Yeah, it's a
really good point.
I think it's just really proven in that way,
and you know, one of the things that was highlighted
was like the virtual GPUs, right?
So, if OpenStack is designed to be pluggable,
what do people want to have as an option now
in terms of compute storage and networking,
on the compute side is they want GPUs,
because that gives an AI machine learning much faster,
if they're bit coin miners, like I'm sure you all are
in your basement,
they're going to want GPUs.
And what was really interesting is that the PTL,
like the technical leader of the Nova Project,
got up and talked about virtual GPUs.
I was back in the green room and like
three of the other keynote speakers were like,
oh man, we are so excited about this VGPU support.
Like, our customers are asking for it,
the guy, Mohammad from Vexos, is the CEO of Vexos,
he said, our customers are demanding this queens release,
which is the latest OpenStack,
and we were kind of surprised,
they just really want this queens release.
So we asked them why and they're like
well they want VGPU.
So that's kind of an example
of an evolution in OpenStack itself,
but it's an extension, enabler for things like GPUs,
and that's kind of an exciting area as well.
>> You know, it's interesting because in previous years
it was the major release was
one of the main things we talked about.
Queens, as you mentioned, other than the VGPUs
and that little discussions,
spent a lot more time outside,
talked to a lot of the users.
You talked about the new tracks that were there.
And something I heard a lot this year
that I hadn't heard for a few years was,
get involved, we're looking to build.
And I was trying to think of a sports analogy,
and maybe it was like, okay,
we're actually building more of a league here
and we're looking to recruit as opposed to or
is it rebuilding what exactly
OpenStack 2.0 is in the future?
>> Yeah, that's a really interesting point.
You're absolutely right, and I
can imagine or can remember sort of talking to
some of the speakers as they were working on their content,
and I don't think I totally picked up
that that was a big trend,
but you're absolutely right,
that was a major call to action
from so many different people.
I think it's because when we think about
what we are as a community,
I talked about how we're a community of people
who build and operate open infrastructure,
and it's really about solving problems,
and if you're as open to community collaboration
and you want to solve problems,
you can't be afraid to stand up and say we have problems.
And sometimes maybe that feels awkward.
It's like the tech 101 is get up and say
you solved all the problems and you should buy it today.
It's online or downloaded or whatever.
And I think we just realized that the magic of our community
is solving problems.
There's always going to be more problems to solve,
now you're putting more pieces together,
which means the pieces themselves have to evolve
and the testing and integration has to evolve.
Like it's just a new set of challenges
and sort of saying, here's what we're trying to solve,
it's not done, help us,
actually is more, I think, true to
kind of what the community is all about.
>> I'm wondering, do we know how many people
are at the show this year?
>> I don't have the exact count.
I think it's around 2600, something like that.
>> Yeah, so fair to say it might be a little bit
less than last year's North America show?
>> Yeah, it is a little bit less.
>> And what are you hearing from the user?
What are the main things they come for?
That you got the new tracks,
you've got the open dev conference co-located.
What kind of key themes can you get from the users?
>> Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that we found
is that we have twice as many cloud architects
this year than a year ago.
So I think there's always this period of time
where conference attendance is driven by curiosity.
Like, I've heard about this thing,
what is it, or it's the cool factor,
hype curves and all that stuff,
I want to learn about it.
At this point people know what OpenStack is.
We've got tons of ways you can learn about it.
There's local meetups, there's OpenStack Days
all over the world,
there's content, videos online.
It's just not like a mystery anymore.
Like the mystery draws in kind of the people
that are just poking around to learn.
Now we're at that point of, okay I know what it is,
I know what it's for,
I want to architect a solution around it,
so seeing twice as many cloud architects
I think is an interesting data point to think about
how we're shifting more towards,
people are not asking if it's proven,
they're like it's been proven for whatever,
two, three years, however, the perception is,
but the technology is just very, very solid.
It's running infrastructure all over the world,
the largest banks and so on and so,
I think that's kind of how things are shifting
to what else can we do and put on top of it,
now that it's a solid foundation.
>> I wonder, sometimes there's that buzz
as to what's going on out there.
There was a certain large analyst firm
that wrote a report a couple months ago
that wasn't all that favorable about OpenStack.
There's others that watching on Twitter during the keynote,
and they're like, they're spending
all their time talking about containers,
why isn't this just part of the Cloud Native Con,
KubCon show?
What's the foundation's feedback on,
what are you hearing kind of,
what's your core deliverables?
And why this show should continue in the future?
>> Sure, I mean I think that what we're hearing generally
from users and seeing in our data as well as from
analysts like 451 and IDC,
those are a couple of different reports coming out,
like right now or just came out,
that Jonathan mentioned this morning,
I think is adoption just continues to grow,
and so you know, I think people are not looking at
just one technology stack.
And maybe they never were, but I think there was this
kind of temptation to just think of it,
is it containers versus VMs
or is it Kubernetes versus OpenStack?
And it's like, no one who really runs infrastructure
thinks like that because they
might have thought it until they tried it,
they realized these things go together.
So I think the future of this conference
is just becoming more and more centered around
what are the use cases?
What are the technical challenges we're trying to solve?
And to the extent we're getting patterns and tools
that are emerging like the lamp stack
of the cloud, so to speak.
How can people adopt them?
So you think about cloud as taking all kinds of new forms,
edge computing, those are the kinds of things
that I think will become a bigger part
of the conference in the future.
I do like the open infrastructure angle on this.
I mean, as infrastructure folks, right,
you know that that storage compute network
doesn't manage itself,
doesn't configure itself.
>> Mark: Totally.
>> Doesn't provision itself.
And so a lot of the app layer things
should rely on this lower layer.
And I thought last year in Boston
there was this kind of curious
OpenStack or containers conversation,
which seemed odd at the time,
and that's clarified, I think,
at a number of levels from a number of camps and vendors.
>> Yeah I agree, I think we have
done our best from our point of view,
from the foundation, myself, and the others
that are involved in our community
to try to dispell those myths or tamper down
that kind of sense of a rivalry,
but it takes time and I do feel like
there is kind of a sea change now.
There are just so many people running in production
with various container tools,
predominantly Kubernetes and in OpenStack
that I think that that sort of myth
that they're, that one's replacing the other,
it's hard for that cognitive dissonance to last forever
when you're given like the hundredth example of
like somebody running in production at scale.
Like they must be doing it for a reason,
and then people start to go, well why is that?
>> And I did like the comment you did make about
cloud is not consolidating and simplifying, right?
Even at the Dell Technologies World show,
Michael Dell got up and talked about the distributed core,
which is a little bit of an oxymoron,
but the fact is compute and compute is everywhere, right?
And it's not only, it's on the edge,
it's on telephone poles, it's in little boxes in our,
you know, going to be on our walls, in our walls, right?
And this open infrastructure idea can play everywhere.
It's not just about an on-prem data center anymore.
>> Yeah and I think that's a big part of why
we started to say open infrastructure instead of cloud,
just because, I mean, you know,
I guess we spent 10 years arguing
over the definition of cloud,
now we can argue over open infrastructure.
But to me it's a little more descriptive
and a little less kind of,
I don't know,
a little less baggage than the term cloud.
>> Yeah, definitely differentiates it
as to where you sit in the marketplace.
And one thing I definitely want to give
the foundation great kudos on,
the diversity of this show is excellent.
Not just that there was a welcome happy hour
and there's a lunch,
but look at all the PTLs, the project leads that are there,
a lot of diversity, up on stage.
It's just evident. >> Mark: Thank you.
>> And it's just something kind of built into the community,
so great job there.
>> Thank you, I'm very proud of the fact
that we had just so many excellent
keynote speakers this morning,
and you know, that's always something that we strive for,
but I feel like we got closer to the goal than ever
in terms of just getting broad
representation up on the stage.
And some amazing leaders.
>> It's always nice from our standpoint
because we always say give us your keynote speakers
and give us some of the main people making things happen,
and it just naturally flows that we have a nice diversity,
from gender, from geography.
>> Yeah, absolutely. >> From various backgrounds,
so that's good.
All right, want to give you the final word.
Take aways that you want people after the show
or maybe some things that people might not know
if they didn't make it here for the show.
>> I mean, I think, you know, the number one take away
is it's all about the people,
and we want to make it about the headlines or the technology,
and even the technology is about the people,
but certainly the operators are not, like I said,
logos don't operate clouds or infrastructure,
people do,
so getting to meet the people,
seeing what they're doing, like the Adobe I mentioned,
they're marketing cloud.
They have 100,000 cores of compute
with four people operating it.
So if you've got the right four people
and the right playbook, you can do that, too.
But you got to meet those people
and find out how they're doing it,
get their recipe, get their playbook,
and they're happy to share it,
and then you can run at that kind of scale, too,
without a big team and you can change the way you operate.
>> Yeah, I know I said in my last question,
but the last thing, I know there's been a big emphasis
to not just do the two big shows a year,
but the OpenStack days and other events globally,
give people, how do they get involved
and where can they come to find out more?
>> Yeah, that's a great question.
I'm glad you asked because,
there are so many ways to get involved
and of course it's online, it's IRC,
it's mailing lists 24/7, but there's no substitute
when it's about the people for meeting in person.
So we have the two summits a year.
We're also having an event which is called the PTG,
which is really for the developers
and some of the operators will be coming this fall as well
where we're having it in Denver,
but the summits are the big shows twice a year,
but the OpenStack days are really important.
Those are annual, typically one to two day events,
in 15 plus countries around the world.
One in particular that is going to be really exciting this year
is in Beijing.
You know, we've had that for the last couple of years.
Huge event, but of course,
others throughout Europe and Asia.
Tokyo is always an awesome OpenStack day,
and then there are quite a few in Europe as well.
So that's another way you can get involved.
Not necessarily have to fly around the world,
but if you do have to fly around the world,
being in Vancouver is not a bad spot, so.
>> Yeah, absolutely, and boy we know
there's a lot of OpenStack happening in China.
>> Yes there is.
>> So Mark Collier, thanks again to the foundation
for allowing theCUBE to cover this.
>> Sure. >> And thanks so much
for joining us. >> Mark: Thank you.
>> For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman,
back here with lots more of three days wall-to-wall coverage
here from OpenStack Summit 2018.
Thanks for watching theCUBE.
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