(upbeat music)
>> Announcer: Live from Los Angeles, it's theCUBE
covering Open Source Summit, North America 2017,
brought to you by the Linux Foundation, and the Red Hat.
>> Okay, welcome back everyone.
Live here in Los Angeles, is theCUBE's exclusive coverage
of the Open Source Summit, North America.
I'm John Furrier, your host, with my cohost,
Stu Miniman with Wikibon.
Our next guest is Ross Turk,
Director of Evangelism at Red Hat.
Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you again.
>> Good to see you.
>> So, evangelizing is now going to be super more important
as Open Source Summit, formerly called The Linux Con,
Linux kernel.
So, Linux is really now the foundation.
So, now all these new products are emerging,
hence the new name Open Source Summit.
You guys are in the middle of it.
>> Ross: Mm-hmm.
>> What's the themes that you guys are pumping out there
right now from an evangelist standpoint?
Give me the order of operations in terms of priorities.
>> Well, gosh, we're trying to tell stories about how people
operate infrastructure in today's modern world, right,
which is a lot about making sure that, you know,
dealing with ephemeral infrastructure,
dealing with containerized applications,
and that sort of thing.
It gives a lot more flexibility to people
who are doing modern operations.
It's about applications that spill over across multiple
machines and doing so in a way that doesn't require a lot of
heavy lifting or wiring things up by hand.
So, there's this whole modern operations experience
thing we talk about, but we also talk about
a modern developer experience.
What does it mean to build applications today?
And, of course, you combine those together
it turns into Dev Ops, right.
But, the large companies still work in
these two separate worlds.
But, people are building technology differently
than they ever did in the past, and they're deploying
it differently than they did in the past.
So, there's lots of stories that can come out of that.
>> Well, let's start with the story that we love.
Stu and I were talking about the server list at the
beginning because you have the Dev Ops movement
certainly is going mainstream.
You're seeing a lot of enterprises
looking at that as viable.
Now, they're operationalizing it, and they need
to have that industrial strength Red Hat, Linux.
But, now Kubernetes and Servalist,
the younger developers, they just want an
infrastructure as code.
>> That seems to be a very hot story here,
and Kubernetes server list is kind of
in the hallway conversations.
How do you guys bring that to bear?
>> Well, I think that what Red Hat does is we give
an operating environment that can sit underneath all of it
with Rail and everything else we build
that is stable and secure and reliable.
And, you need that in order to have all of
this chaos happening above it with developers
deploying microservices and moving things around,
and demands changing and all these other things,
you need to have something really stable and
reliable underneath that, something that you know
can be if the applications and virtual machines
and containers aren't long running,
what sits underneath of them is long running,
and it still needs to be stable and reliable.
So, a lot of the work we've been doing for the past 20 years
around Linux Engineering, I think, contributes to
making this stable environment for a modern developer.
>> Yeah, Ross, one of the challenges in scaling is usually
I've got to worry things like storage.
You know, state is there, you know data gravity is
something we need to be concerned about.
It's great to say ephemeral and I want everything anywhere,
and, I can put it in this cloud or use it in that
application, but at the end of the day it's tough
to build some of these pieces.
How's Red Hat helping there as containerization
and scale, how does that fit into kind of this storage
discussion moving on?
>> It's a real struggle right, because you can talk to
people and they say oh, every single one of the
microservices held over and they scale out, and all this,
and they talk about this really elaborate infrastructure
like well, where is all your data being stored?
Oh, it's sitting in Oracle, you know,
so you find this sort of like dissonance between
how data is managed and how applications are managed.
At Red Hat, we believe that storage should be another
microservice alongside all the other
microservices make up and application.
So, that's why we put a lot of engineering effort into
making things like Ceph and Red Hat Gluster Storage
work well alongside Open Shift so that a developer
can provision storage as needed without having to go to an
ops person, and that when that storage gets provisioned
it's in containers alongside other containers that are
providing the other things that your application needs.
>> Software defined storage was the answer,
it's the Holy Grail.
We've heard software defined data center.
We've been covering this also in the VM world,
heard an awful lot about that.
But, that still is a key part of the software,
and now you have hardware stacks, so IOT and Cloud are
opening up these new use cases for enterprises where
whoa, we actually kind of didn't test that hardware
with that software, so it's kind of interesting dynamic
because software defined is still super important.
What's your view on software defined storage, in particular,
is that an answer, is it stable, what's your thoughts?
>> Well, I think it's an answer, but it depends on
what the question is, just to be kind of--
>> What is software defined storage?
Let's start with that one.
>> Well, so, what is software defined storage?
Software defined storage is, okay, so I'll say it in
more like what it isn't.
>> The traditional storage, traditional storage solutions
get deployed as appliances, which are vertically integrated
hardware and software solutions that are built to do one
thing, and to do that one thing well.
And, that one thing is to store data.
They're kind of like big refrigerator-sized things
that you bring into your data center with a forklift
and it's a big oepration, and then they provide storage
for any number of applications.
What software defined storage does is it implements
those same services and those same capabilities,
but it does it entirely in software.
So, instead of being this vertically integrated software,
hardware solution, you end up with software that lets
you build it on any hardware, and that hardware can
be physical hardware so you can build a storage cluster
made up of 1,000 bare metal servers,
or you could build that same cluster on a
thousand VMs inside of a public cloud.
So, in making storage no longer a hardware problem,
like it used to be, I mean fundamentally it's a
hardware problem, you get down bits are stored somewhere,
but, the management of storage is no longer a hardware
concern, it's a software concern, now,
and that means it's a little bit more flexible.
You can containerize it.
You can deploy it in the public cloud.
You can deploy it in VMs.
You can deploy it on bare metal.
So, that's what software defined storage is doing
is it's changing things around,
but it requires different skills.
>> Come on Ross, I want a storageless environment,
can we get on that?
>> A storageless environment?
Sure, I guess.
Storage has become somebody else's problem at that point.
>> Absolutely, how about, how is containers
changing that whole discussion?
You know, it took us like a decade to kind of get storage
working in a virtualized environment,
networking seems to be really tackling the container piece,
storage seems a little further behind,
you know, what're you seeing some of the big challenges
there and how are we looking to solve that?
>> Well, here there's when you look at
containers and storage,
there are really two things to consider.
The first is how do you make storage such that a
containerized environment can consume it easily, right.
This is what at Red Hat we call container ready.
So, we call a storage solution container ready,
what it means that your container platform
knows how to consume it.
Most storage is container ready, all it takes is a
Kubernetes volume driver to be container ready,
and that's one half of it,
and that's really, really important.
It's the same kind of thing we had to do with
virtualization, making sure every hypervisor could talk
to every storage system.
Now, we're making sure every container platform
can talk to every storage system.
That's important, but it's only half the puzzle,
'cause the other half is now that you have storage
as a software thing, a distributed software thing,
you can actually deploy that storage inside the same
containers that you're using, that are driving
the demand for that storage.
So, it's this kind of weird, you know, snake eating it's own
tail thing where you as a developer, let's say I'm deploying
an application, I need a database, I need a web server,
blah, blah, and a bunch of other things,
and I need a scale out storage system,
I can deploy that in containers just
alongside everything else,
and it uses the local storage of each of the
container hosts to build that shared storage that then
is used to provide services to
other containerized applications.
So, it's the ability to have storage in containers
Which is really strange.
We call that container native storage.
>> It's interesting the markets going pretty crazy,
so if you kind of take the Dev Ops and say
assume for a minute infrastructure is programmable.
>> Mm-hmm.
>> But, then you look at the developer action right now
on the App side, we've seen all kinds of new stuff
Apple has their announcement today with the new iPhone 8.
We've been covering that on siliconangle.com.
Forbes has got great stories as well.
New AR kit, so augmented reality is a huge deal,
virtual reality obviously still hyped up, is still promised,
those are going to require new chips.
That's going to require consumer behavior change,
so, the developers are staring at a different market
than worrying about provisioning storage, right.
So, but, these are now new pressures.
New hardware, new opportunities, as a developer,
advocate, and evangelist, and an industry participant,
and user, how do you look at that, and how is that impacting
the developer market because Androids got good stuff
coming down, too, not just Apple, Samsung?
>> Ross: Yeah.
>> It's all multimedia, I mean.
>> Well, what's interesting about AR kit is that if
you go just back five years that same capability
required a very, very particular type of phone, you know,
like the project Tango stuff required all these depth
cameras and like connect style stuff to do the AR kit,
and Apple was able to solve a lot of that in software
just using two cameras, right, and in software.
And, I think that's really--
>> John: On a phone?
>> On a phone, on a phone no less, and I think what's
amazing about that is all of the capabilities that we
walk around with in our pocket now were really hard
to get a long time ago.
>> Well, this is interesting, your point, let's stay on this
because this really illustrates the point.
AR kit, for example is proving that the iPhone now
is smart enough and with software, enough horsepower to do
that kind of thing, but that's replicable across all
devices now as an IOT device.
The Internet of Things is going to be a freight train
coming down the tracks, security, endpoint security,
whether it's, I mean all kinds of coolness,
but yet threats are there.
So, software has to do all this, right.
So, how's that going to impact the cloud game,
your business, you guys you have to move faster
on hardening things, be more organic on the innovation side,
not business-wise, but technical strategy.
>> Well, I think a lot of it is enabling developers
to work more quickly and build features more quickly,
also, educating developers on the security and privacy
ramifications of the things that they build because
it's really easy to just go out in front and advance
and innovate and forget about all of that stuff.
So, it's about changing developer culture so that you
consider security and privacy first, as opposed to later.
And, also, maybe you want to consider storage as well
if you're talking about machine learning or IOT and
all of these types of things, you're --
>> Videos, I mean this is video, software rendering.
That's a storage nightmare.
>> It's all got to live somewhere, and once you put it in
that place where it lives, it's really hard to move it.
So, this is a thing you want to
plan from the very beginning.
>> And, I think that's what's cool about AI, too,
and self-driving cars it's a consumer, you know, flashy,
coolness that can say hey, this is happening.
I mean how fast is happening, but the developer is
now bringing it to the businesses and say, okay,
we don't have an AR virtual reality strategy for
our retail, for instance, you potentially
could be out of business.
So, these are the kind of thoughts that are going
at the C-level that now are going into what used to be IT,
but all of IT, how do you handle this?
This is an architectural question, so your thoughts on that,
because that seems to be a conversation we see a lot.
Architectural that's going to solve problems today,
not foreclose future opportunities.
>> Well, it's cultural, too, inside of the company,
like everywhere inside of a company there used to be
Internet teams in companies, remember.
We used to be like oh, go talk to the Internet team
because something's wrong with the Web or whatever,
now, there's no Internet team,
everybody's the Internet team,
Every single team in an organization is thinking about
how to leverage the Internet to
make their job more effective.
The same is going to be true for everything that we're
talking about, you know.
Security, interestingly enough, so many people always
thought security was somebody else's problem.
but just this week, we were reminded that it's everybody's
problem, hundreds of millions of people's problem, security.
So, I think that as these things kind of advance--
>> John: Security first, and privacy first is critical.
>> It is absolutely critical, and there used to be,
I mean, I think at some point maybe there won't be a
security team inside of a company because everybody's
going to be the security team, but it's like everybody's
the Internet team now, and I always felt the same way
about open source communities.
I thought there would never, you know, always everybody--
>> Well, people are ruling their own security now.
You have these LifeLock or whatever they call them,
these services for a password protection because you
can't trust even all these databases that are out there.
You have block chain with immutability, yeah, certainly
the wallets are not yet, but I mean certainly this is
where it might be a future scenario.
>> Yeah, and I think for all of these things
agility is going to be key.
The ability to go down a path a certain distance and
realize whoa I've run into a privacy problem,
back up a little bit, continue down another path.
I think that the faster we can make the development process,
I think the less risky we make going
into all these new frontiers.
>> Yeah, Ross, one of the things we've really liked watching
the last kind of five years or so is storage turning into
a discussion of data and how can we leverage that data,
real-time data, you know, decisions at the edge, analytics,
what's exciting you the most about kind of the
storage world these days?
>> Oh boy.
Well, you know, I just spent about five years
in the storage infrastructure world, so a lot of what kind
of kept me going day and night was saving people money,
making things faster, making things easier, but also,
giving storage platforms that were elastic enough to
handle all of this really interesting
stuff that happens on top of them.
So, there's all kinds of new big data stacks that I find
particularly interesting, a lot of the real time analysis
stuff like Apache Spark and things like that.
There's so much going into visualization right now, as well,
how you handle large amounts of time series data
and that sort of thing.
There's been a lot of advancements in exactly that.
Personally, I'm really excited lately in all the data
of this stuff, all the ways you can extract meaning
from all this data, you know, the ways that you can
give it a business context that allows you to make
better decisions with it.
>> Not a lot of data conversations here at this conference
as is open source software, but I mean data I mean I've
said and I wrote a blog post in 2008
Dave always, Dave Olantho always jokes with me because I
always reference it, I said data is the new development kit,
meaning data is going to be part of the software
development model, and it actually is with big data,
but, you're not hearing a lot of it here because most
people are talking about their communities, their projects,
but the role of data is fundamental at the edge.
>> Ross: Absolutely.
>> And, so, how is that going to change some of these
conversations and can data be developed on,
and is data now part of the software development life cycle
that's coming to fruition in the new way.
>> Interesting, I think that's an interesting observation
that as we see sort of Dev and Ops coming together, right,
the world of the operator and the world of the developer
coming together, I think we'll probably, at some point,
see the world of the developer come together with
the world of the data scientist because as I kind of
wrack my brain I'm thinking okay, what type of future
developer wouldn't have to be dealing with large amounts
of data wouldn't have to have that kind of skill
to be able to deal with it.
So, I think we're going to start to see more software
developers getting more involved in big data,
machine learning, data analytics,
and things like that for sure.
>> Well, either way, this open source growth that's
coming is going to be exponential.
Data is already there.
I mean we have a joke in our office software is eating
the world as Mark Andreasen would say years ago,
but, data is eating software.
So, in terms of how you look at it someone's eating
somebody, but, this becomes interesting for
the IOT developer, or the industrial developer.
Those systems were never connected to IT in the past.
It was like they ran their own stuff from
their own terminals.
>> And, there's this idea that everybody's heard that
data has gravity, right.
And, I actually was talking to somebody about this
and they said, well, actually the data has inertia,
and I'm like, no, that's not really it
'cause once it's moving it's not hard to stop it.
The idea that data has gravity means that let's say
I'm putting together this new IOT application, or whatever,
I'm gathering data from a bunch of sensors or whatever,
and I've got the data in that place.
Now, having all that data in that place is more meaningful
to me than most of the software that I wrote.
You know, it's like that is the value,
the kernel of the data is there, and data having gravity
means that it's hard to move once it's in a certain place,
but, it also means that it attracts workloads to it, right.
So, it used to be that software was king, and software
created data and managed data, and now data is king,
and it brings software to it, I think.
>> I totally agree with you, and I think they might even
call this the open data summit soon,
but it's beyond open source.
Now, this is going to be great.
They work hand in hand.
Software and data are going to be great.
Stu what's your thoughts on the role that data's not
being talked much here?
>> Yeah, John at Amazon weighed in last year.
When we talked to Andy Jassy it was the customers were
the flywheel, and I think data's going to be
that next flywheel of really feeding into that data
gravity discussion that you were having, Ross.
You know, when Hadoop came out it was like oh, we're
going to bring the code to the data.
Well, we know if I'm going to have more data I'm going to
have my data sources, I'm going to have third party
data sources that I want to be able to work and
interact with those, so, data absolutely huge opportunities
there, and the companies that can leverage that and
get more value out of it is going to be a--
>> Well, we already see it's a competitive advantage,
no doubt, but it's the privacy issue still the big
debate like we know in our immediate businesses.
Look at Facebook, I've got a free App I get to
see all my friends' photos,
their vacations, everyone's living a great life on Facebook,
but, then all of a sudden I give my data away for free
for the privilege to use that App,
but all the sudden they start injecting fake news at me.
I don't want that anymore, and you're still making money
off of my data, so that's interesting.
Facebook makes money off of my data.
>> Yeah, that's-- >> That's my contract
with them.
>> Yeah, If you ask what their asset is, one person might
think it's traffic, you know, or eyeballs,
but, I think it's data.
>> So, they're using data, I might not like it,
so that might be an opportunity for somebody else
so your point Stu, so if you start thinking about it
differently, data decisions are going to be
an architectural challenge.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
I think enterprise architecture thinking, even today,
you're seeing enterprise architects thinking more
and more and more about data than they have in the past.
>> Ross, what do you think about the show, final word in
the segment, what's going on Open Source Summit,
share with the folks that are watching?
>> The vibe here, it's now a new name,
but it's still the same game, multiple events come together.
>> Yeah, multiple events together.
I like Open Source Summit as a name.
I think it's a good name.
It's properly named for what's going on here.
It's been an interesting experience for me because
I've been in this community for a really long time.
So, I come here and I run into all kinds of old friends,
the hallway track's always a good track for me.
The content is fantastic, but the hallway track is
always really good, and I can't think of anywhere
else where you can go and get this
selection of people, right.
You have people who're working on all layers of the problem,
and they can all come together and talk.
So, I don't know--
>> It's really a cross-fertilization, cross-pollination,
whatever word you want to use.
I think this event's going to be
in the 30,000 pretty quickly.
I mean this is going to be.
Well, if you look at the growth, the numbers,
you know, presented on stage, Jim Zemlon,
was pointing out the growth, by 2026, 400 million libraries.
I mean people still think that's underestimated.
>> Yeah. >> So, that's a lot of growth.
>> I think it could get there, and I think these folks
organize great shows, so I look forward to seeing
them scale up to 30,000.
>> Ross, thanks for your commentary, appreciate the
perspective, and the insight here on theCUBE.
>> Thank you. >> Thanks for joining us.
This is theCUBE live coverage from
Open Source Summit, North America.
I'm John, for Stu Miniman,
back with more after this short break.
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