>> Voiceover: Live from Boston, Massachusetts,
it's the Cube, covering OpenStack Summit 2017.
Brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation, Red Hat,
and additional Ecosystem as support.
>> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman joined by John Troyer.
This is Silken Angle Media's
production of the Cube at OpenStack Summit.
We're the world wide leader in
tech coverage, live tech coverage.
Happy to welcome back to the program
someone we've had on so many times we can't keep track.
He is the creator of the term Pets versus Cattle,
he is one of the OG of The Cloud Group,
Randy, you know, wrote about everything
before most of it was done.
So good to see you,
thank you for joining us.
>> Thanks for having me.
>> Alright, so Randy, coming into this show
we felt that it was a bit of resetting expectations,
people not understanding, you know,
where infrastructure's going, a whole hybrid
multi-cloud world, so, I mean you've told us all
how it's going to go, so where are we today,
what have people been getting wrong,
what's your take coming into this week and what you've seen?
>> Well, I've said it before, which is that
the public clouds have done more
than just deliver compute storage and networking on demand.
What they've really done is they've built
these massive development organizations.
They're very sophisticated, that are, you know,
that really come from that Webscale background
and move at a velocity that's really different
than anything we've seen before,
and I think the hope in the early days of OpenStack
was that we would achieve a similar kind of
velocity and momentum, but I think the reality
is is that it just hasn't really materialized;
that while there are a lot of projects
and there are a lot of contributors
the coordination between them is very poor,
and you know it's just not the,
like architectural oversight that
we really needed isn't there.
I, a couple years ago at the Openstack Silicon Valley
gave a presentation called
The Lie of the Benevolent Dictator,
and I chartered a course for how we could
actually have more of a technical architecture oversight,
and just that really fell on deaf ears.
And so we continue to do the same thing
and expect different results and I just,
that's a little disappointing for me.
>> Yeah. So what is your view of hybrid cloud?
You know, no disagreement, you look at
what the public cloud companies,
especially the big three, the development
that they can do, Amazon, a thousand new features a year,
Google, what they can do with data,
Microsoft has a whole lot of applications
and communities around them.
We're mostly talking about private cloud here,
it was a term that you fought against for many years,
we've had great debates on it,
so how does that hybrid play out?
Cause customers, they're keeping on premises.
Edge fits into a lot of this too, so it's,
there's not one winner, it's not a zero sum game,
but how does that hybrid cloud work?
>> Yeah so, I didn't fight against private cloud,
I qualified it. I said if it's going to be
a private cloud it's got to be built
and look and smell the way that the public cloud was.
Alright? If it's just VM ware with VM's on demand,
that's not a private cloud.
That was my position.
And then in terms of hybrid cloud, you know,
I don't think we're there yet.
I've presented on this at many different OpenStacks,
you can see it in the past, and I sort of laid out
what needs to happen and that didn't happen.
But I think there's hope, and I think the hope
comes in the form of Kubernetes,
and to a certain degree, Helm.
And the reason that Kubernetes with Helm
is very powerful is that Kubernetes gives us
a computive traction, so that
you don't care if you're on the public cloud,
or you know OpenStack or Vmware or whatever,
and then what Helm gives us is our charts,
so ways to deploy services, not just software,
and so what we could think about doing in the future
is building hybrid cloud based off of Kubernetes and Helm.
>> Yeah, so Randy since last time we talked
you've got a new role, you're now with Juniper.
Juniper had done a Contrail acquisition.
You know, quite a few years back you wrote
a good blueprint on one of the Juniper forums
about the OpenContrail communities.
So tell us a little bit about your role,
your goals, in that community.
>> So OpenContrail has been a primarily Juniper initiative,
and we're going to press the reset button
on the OpenContrail community.
I'm going to do it tonight
and call for people to sort of get involved
in doing that reset, and when I say reset
I mean, wipe the operating system, reload it from scratch,
and do it really as a community, not just
as a Juniper run initiative, and so people
inside Juniper are very excited about this,
and what we're trying to do is that we believe that
the path forward for OpenContrail is ubiquitous adoption.
So rather then playing for just the pieces that we have,
which we've done a great job of,
we want to take the world's best SDN controller
and we want to make sure everybody uses it,
because we think aggregate that's good for not only
the entire community but also Juniper.
>> So, love the idea of kind of rebooting
the community in the open, right,
because you have to be transparent
about these sort of things.
>> Randy: Yeah, that's right.
>> What are the community segments
that you would like to see join you
here in the OpenContrail?
What kind of users, what kind of companies
would you like to see come in to the tent?
>> Well anybody's welcome, but we want to start
with all of our key stakeholders that exist today,
so first one, and arguably one of the most important
is our competitors, right so we're hoping to have
Mirantis at the table, maybe Ericcson, Huawei, anybody.
Cisco, hey come join the party.
Second is that we have done really well
in Sass and in gaming, and we'd like to see
all of those companies come to the table as well,
Workday, Symantech, and so on.
The third segment is enterprises,
we've done well in financial services, we think that
that's a really important segment because
they're leading edge of enterprises typically,
and the fourth is the carrier's obviously
incredibly important for Juniper,
folks like AT&T, Direction Telecom,
all those companies we'd love to see come to the table.
And then that's really the primary focus,
and then anybody else who wants to show up,
anybody who wants to develop in Contrail
in the future we'd love to have there.
>> Well with open source communities, right,
there's always a balance of the contributors
and developers versus operators,
and we can use the word contributors in a lot of roles.
Some open source communities, much more developer focused,
>> Randy: That's right.
>> Others more operator focused,
where do you see this OpenContrail community
starting out?
>> So where it's been historically is more
of our end users and operators.
>> I think that's interesting and an interesting twist
because I think sometimes open source communities
get stuck with just the people who can contribute code,
and I'm from an operator community myself,
>> Randy: Right.
>> So I think that's really interesting.
>> We still want all those people
but I think what has happened is that
when people have come in and they wanted to be
more sort of on the developer side,
the community hasn't been friendly to them.
>> John: Okay.
>> Randy: And so we want, that's a key thing
that we want to change.
You know when we were talking,
to certain carriers they came and they said look,
it's great you're going to do this,
we want to be a part of it, and one of the things
we'd like to contribute is
more advanced testing around VMFs.
And I just look at that and I'm just like
that's what we need, right?
Juniper is not, can't carry all the water
on having, you know, sophisticated test suites
for VMFs and more advanced networking use cases,
but the carriers are deep into this
and we'd love to have them come and bring that.
So not just developers, but also QA, people who want to
increase the code quality, the architectural quality,
and the aggregate value of OpenContrail.
>> Okay, Randy can you help place OpenContrail
where it fits in this kind of networking spectrum,
especially, there's open source things,
we've talked about about VPP a couple times on theCube here.
The joke for many years was SDN still does nothing,
NFV solutions have grown, have been huge use case,
is really where the early money
for big deployments have been for OpenStack.
Where does OpenContrail fit, where does it kind of
compare and contrast against some
of the other options out there.
>> I'm going to answer that slightly differently.
I've been skeptical about SDN overlays for a long time,
and now I am helping with one of the world's
best SDN overlays, and what's changed for me
is that in the last year I've seen key customers
of Contrail's, of Juniper's actually
do something very interesting, right.
You've got an SDN overlay, it's complex,
it's hard to void, you got to wonder,
why should I do this?
Well I thought the same thing
about virtualization, right, until I figured out,
sort of what was the killer app.
And what we've seen is a company, one of our customers,
and several others, but one in particular
I can talk about publicly, Riot Games,
take containers and OpenContrail and marry them
so that you have an abstraction around compute,
and an abstraction around networking,
so that their developers can write to that,
and they don't care whether that's running
on top of public cloud, private cloud,
or in some partner's data center globally.
And in fact they're going to talk about that today
at OpenContrail days at 3:30, and are going to present
a lot more details, and that's amazing to me
because by abstracting a way and disintermediating
the public clouds, you actually have more power, right.
You can build your own framework.
And if you're using Kubernetes as a baseline
you can do a lot more on top of that computing
network abstraction.
>> You talked about OpenContrail days,
again my first summit, I've actually been impressed
by the foundation, acknowledging there's a huge landscape
of open source and other technologies around there,
OpenStack itself doesn't invent everything.
Can you talk a little bit about that kind of attitude
of bringing, I mean we talk about Kubernetes and that
sort of thing, but all the other CNCF projects,
monitoring, even components like SCD, right,
we're talking about here at this conference.
So, can you talk a little bit about how OpenStack
can interact with the rest of the open source
and cloud native at-large community?
>> That's sort of a tough question John.
>> John: Okay.
>> I mean the reason I say that is like the origins
of OpenStack are very much NIH and there has been
a very disturbing tendency to sort of re-invent the wheel.
A great example is Keystone, still to this day
I don't know why Keystone exists and why we created
a whole new authentic standard when there were
dozens and dozens of battle-tested, battle-hardened
protocols and bits of code that existed prior.
It's great that we're getting a little bit better at that
but I still sense that the origins of the community
and some of the technical leadership have resistance
to organizing and working with outside components
and playing nice.
So, it's better but it's not great, it's not
where it should be.
Really OpenStack needs to be broken down
into a lot of different projects that can compete
with each other and all run in parallel
without having to be so tightly wound together.
It's still disappointing to me
that we aren't doing that today.
>> Randy, wonder if you could give us a little bit
of a personal reflection, you've been involved in cloud
many years, we've talked about some of the state of it,
where do you think enterprises are when they think about
their IT, how IT relates to business,
some of the big challenges they're facing,
and kind of this rapid pace of change
that's happening in our industry right now
>> Yeah well the pressures just increase.
The need to pick up speed and to move faster
and to have a greater velocity, that's not going away,
that seems to be like an incredible macro-trend
that's just going to keep driving people towards
the next event.
But what I see is that the tension between
the infra-structure IT teams and the line of business
hasn't really started to get resolved.
You see a lot of enterprises back into using
DevOps as a way to try to fix the culture change problems
but it's just not happening fast enough.
I have a lot of concerns that basically private cloud
or private infra-structure for enterprises
will just not materialize in the way it needs to
for the next generation.
And that the line of business will continue
to just keep moving to public cloud.
All the while all the money that's being reinvested
in the public cloud is increasing their capabilities
in terms feature sets and security capabilities and so on.
I just, I don't see the materialization of private cloud
happening very well at this point in time
and I don't see any trendlines that tell me
it's going to change.
>> Yeah, what recommendations do you give today
to the OpenStack foundation?
I know that you haven't been shy in the past
about giving guidance as to the direction,
what do you think needs to happen to be able
to help customers along that journey that they need?
>> I don't give any guidance to the OpenStack
Foundation anymore, I'm not on the Board of Directors,
and frankly I gave a lot of advice in the past
that fell on deaf ears and people were unwilling
to make the changes that were necessary
I think to create success.
And even though I was eventually proven right,
there doesn't seem to be an appetite for change.
I would say that the hard partition between
the Board of Directors and the technical committee
that was created at the outset with the founding
of the Foundation has let to a big problem
which is that there's simply business concerns
that are technical concerns and there are technical concerns
which are business concerns and the actual structure
of the Foundation does not allow that to occur
because that hard partition between them.
So if people on Board of Directors can't actually
tell the TC that they'd like to see
certain technical changes because they're business concerns
and Technical Committee can't tell the Board of Directors
they'd like to see business changes made because
they're technical concerns around them.
And I think that's, it's fundamentally broken
until the bylaws are fixed.
>> So Randy beyond what we've talked about already
what's exciting you these days, you look at like
the serverless trend, is that something that
you find intriguing or maybe contrary view on it,
what's exciting you these days?
>> Serverless is really interesting.
In fact I'd like to see serverless at the edge.
I think it would be fascinating if Amazon webservices
could sell a serverless capability that was actually running
in the mobile carriers edge.
So like on the mobile towers or in essential offices.
But you could do distributive computation for IOT
literally at the very edge of the network,
that would be incredibly powerful.
So I am very interested in serverless in that regard.
With Kubernetes, I think that this is the future,
I think I've seen most of the other initiatives
start to fail at this point.
Docker Incorporated just hasn't made the progress
they need to, hopefully a change in leadership
will fix that.
But it does mean that more and more people are gravitating
towards Kubernetes and that's a thing because
whereas OpenStack is historically got no opinion,
Kubernetes is a much more prescriptive model
and I think that actually leads to faster innovation,
a greater pace of change and combined with Helm charts,
I think that we're going to see an ecosystem develop
around Kubernetes that actually could be a counterweight
to the public clouds and really be sort of cloud agnostic.
Private, public, at the edge, who cares?
>> Randy Bias, always appreciated your very opinionated
viewpoints on everything that are happening here.
Pleasure to catch up with you as always.
John and I will be back will lots more coverage
here from OpenStack Summit in Boston,
thanks for watching the Cube.