Kevin Carter on Rackspace Technology’s Re-Commitment to OpenStack

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone. Welcome back here to Textron tv.

Our next guest on Techron today is Kevin Carter. Kevin's a product director over at Rackspace Technology. I'm sure many of you have heard or are familiar with Rackspace.

If you've been in the data center world over the last quarter century or more, Rackspace has been a constant, but you know, there's a lot of things going on in the world, and we're going to hear more about it. Well, first, let's welcome Kevin. Hey, Kevin, welcome to Tech Truck tv.

How are you? I'm doing great. Thank you, Alan, for having me on today.

Appreciate you. My pleasure. Me being here.

And so, uh, yeah, thank you again. Not a problem. Not a problem.

Kevin, I, I mentioned you were product director at Rackspace, but you know, you weren't born the product director at Rackspace. That's, that's fact, yes. So if you wanna mind share with our audiences a little bit about your own story.

Sure, sure. So, yeah, my name's Kevin Carter. I'm the product director for the OpenStack product, uh, here at Rackspace.

But like you said, I wasn't board of product director. I started off as, you know, humble beginnings, uh, you know, doing Linux system administration actually. Alright.

And so I, I started, you know, on the keyboard, on the command line doing, uh, just, you know, uh, low level system administration. I moved from there into some, uh, software developments, DevOps, when that was created. Um, and then, uh, you know, took on some role leadership roles, uh, technical leadership roles at Rackspace and a couple other companies that I worked at, um, to, to develop products and, you know, create initiatives and things like that.

And re recently I've returned to Rackspace to come back and, uh, to, to lead this new product initiative at Rackspace for our enterprise pro, uh, you know, our enterprise OpenStack clouds. So, yeah. So you, you, you're a returnee to Rackspace?

I, I am. I've, yeah. So I, I started at Rackspace in 2011 and then, uh, uh, worked there until just, uh, you know, mid to late 2018.

And then, uh, just about a year ago came back. Wow, that's great. So Pretty, pretty excited about it.

Yeah, exactly. So like you said, you know, I wasn't born of product director, but, uh, had, had been doing producty things or product adjacent things over, over the last, let's call it a decade. Absolutely.

Very cool. com days. Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And, um, you know, Rackspace is an old, gone through a lot of changes over those these years, you know, always a force in the data center space. Um, but, you know, different regimes, different focuses and what have you. If you had to kind of describe to our audience Rackspace technology today, how would you say, what would you say, Kevin?

I would say that we're, you know, uh, rediscovering a lot of who we are and who, who we, who we want to be when we grow up kind of thing. Like, we've gone through that, those, those early phases of, you know, uh, we are a hosting company and we just did one thing, and then we were a data center company and we did a few things. And then we became this open cloud company where we, you know, did the OpenStack initiatives and, and came out swinging there.

Um, and then recently pivoted into, uh, you know, running on multiple clouds and, and supporting lots of different e ecosystems and platforms. And so I think we are now coming back into the realization that really we're, we're technologists that do support really well. Like we are technologists.

We are able to distill technology, simplify it, and make it enterprise ready for customers to consume in a way that, uh, is, is innovative, is new, is exciting, and can maintain them with a lifetime of, of their business, of their initiatives, of their products. So we can be that arm, that enterprise arm that, that gives customers that, uh, that, uh, you know, faith in the technology that they're, they're operating in without having to really just, you know, be in the mix all the time. Like, you can, you can lean on us when you need us, and we're always there when you need us.

Sure. So, you know, look, to me, when you look at the history of Rackspace, you know, the history of Rackspace is written across the background of the cloud for sure, right? Yeah.

So when Rackspace first started, the cloud wasn't a thing. Yeah, yeah. The data centers, right?

Yeah. And, and Rackspace was VPCs, right? Yeah, yeah, Yeah.

Absolutely. But I remember those things. Rackspace or Rack, it was V VPs, right?

It was V VPs, yeah. VPS. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah. You know, and there, there were some others IIBM board also was in Texas, like Rackspace from headquartered there. I don't even even remember that name.

But in any event, you know, the public cloud cloud burst on the scene. And I think quite frankly, Rackspace kinda went through this thing, look, we're a private cloud. We don't, do we really want to be a public cloud?

And there was a little bit of a, a dance around that. And then there was a little bit of a dalliance around, well, we don't wanna be public Alec, we'll just partner with AWS let's say. And, you know, for people who weren't that hybrid, we, we give them the private and public thing, and, and we weren't do that.

And as you mentioned, Rackspace became a huge, they always were, but it became very publicly a huge supporter of open source and OpenStack. Yeah, yeah. Specifically as the dominant, you know, sort of, uh, wanna call it private cloud.

You don't hear the term private cloud as much anymore, but Yeah. Yeah. A dominant cloud platform.

Um, and then, you know, look, corporate greed gets in the way, buyers, sellers, you know, and everything else. Public markets, life happens. Life happens.

Yes. Um, but here we are, 2024 going into 2025, and it's in many ways coming back to its roots, right? The, the worms turned full circle.

A hundred percent. And part of that is you guys recommitting to OpenStack. That's Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. Yep. Press release came out this week, why don't, you know, let's just focus in on OpenStack, Kevin, and that's what you're the product director of anyway, so it's the right, right person to have here.

Of course. And I know a couple of things there. Yeah.

Yeah. A couple of leads. Yeah.

Was there a defocus on OpenStack that we have to refocus or recommit or, you know, bring us up to today, if you will? Yeah, sure. I mean, so there, I mean, there was, there was a, a deprioritization in, in OpenStack's commitment upstream right?

From at Rackspace, but we never stopped operating OpenStack clouds. Like we, we still have our, our OpenStack public cloud. It's still operating, it's still running.

Um, you know, when we founded OpenStack in 2010, we put it our OpenStack public cloud into production in 2012. It's been operating since then. It's never been turned off.

There are tens of thousands of customers on it today. Um, and, and, and it's, it's running really well. Um, and then we have our enterprise business, our, our private cloud business, which is our, you know, uh, in customer data centers, you know, serving unique single tenant environments.

And that has been, again, running really well for a long time. But yeah, there was this, this in-between time, right? Um, where we were committing millions of lines of code, uh, upstream into the Opens SEC foundation, open Infrastructure Foundation all the time.

Just this like churn happening, you know, development at a, at a breakneck speed. And then we, we, we, that tapered off it, it kind of stopped for a little while. And, um, but now we're back with it.

And, and the reason was is because we really, you know, we are, like I said before, we are rediscovering our, our, our technologist roots, right? And we want to be in this space. We wanna be that enterprise leader for this open infrastructure.

And so while we, you know, have been gone for a little while, uh, we are back and we are ready to, to displace giants. So let me peel that on you back. Yeah.

Let's peel away what is, What is, what does we are back exactly mean. You're gonna start contributing covid a hundred percent Code and, you know, financial commitments into the OpenStack infra foundation. And so great, you know, uh, we are, we are committed into becoming a, uh, a partner into the OpenStack infra foundation, uh, contributing code, getting re developers in, in, into that space and, uh, getting our, our, you know, people accustomed into working into those public avenues again.

Yep. So what do you think is driving that beyond, you know, nostalgia or wanting to get back to your roots, right? Yeah.

It's business. There's dollars and cents involved here always. Yeah.

What, what, where are the dollars and cents that's driving this? Where are they? That's, you know, that's a good que I mean, so, uh, we have our, we have our two different business units, like I said, that are going really strong, but where, uh, bef, um, it's about a year ago, right?

As I've been at Rackspace, back at Rackspace for about a year, and I came back into this role for this mission. And so about a year ago, we, we started my leadership, uh, under Josh vra and, you know, decided that we were gonna combine our multiple open stack business units into one open stack, you know, uh, one single unified business unit, and really drive this mission of what we like to call the one OpenStack strategy. So it's a unified, you know, application stream or everything that is open stack.

And so when we're, we're talking about where are the dollars and cents, so like, what, it's, it really is a matter of like, uh, you know, we need to be able to bring the technology to our customers, right? Instead of trying to, a lot of, a lot of, you know, technological innovations fail because they're just like, ah, we have this amazing thing. Come get it.

But we, OpenStack already is this amazing thing. Now let's try to get it in front of our, in, you know, our enterprise customers, our, our, our end users, and show how it can solve different problems for them in, in very, uh, you know, malleable ways. And I think that's super true right now because we see huge, you know, efforts for, uh, cloud repatriation, you know, coming out of some hyperscalers and going into their own data centers.

We see huge efforts, um, in, in scaling out, you know, what has, you know, historically been the private cloud business and trying to get a, a handle on, you know, those, those resources at large. And OpenStack is a fantastic resource manager. The other thing that OpenStack does really well is it, it it is able to, to, to use those resources wherever they happen to be, right?

You could have old Broadwell servers or brand new Epic servers, and OpenStack runs perfectly on both of them. And so we can actually leverage those older, older devices, those brand new devices, and build a unified cloud ecosystem that lets you, you know, do your current business and grow into whatever your future business happens to become. And that is more prevalent even today, you know, with all of the ai ml generative, uh, you know, capabilities that are coming online.

So where's the business? You know, where's the dollars and cents? I think that's, they're all over the place, but the, uh, um, the, that's the nice part about OpenStack is that it can fit those different situations, be it a hybrid cloud, uh, be it a single tenant, you know, enterprise, private cloud, um, a hyper converged cloud.

Um, it just, yeah, it's, it's very, uh, it's very agile. And so absolutely, the platform is very pluggable. And so you only need to take the, the parts that you need, right?

Yeah. There aren't these single unified packages where you have to use all this stuff, or you get all this stuff and you, and you're not gonna use it. Whereas OpenStack is, if you only need, you know, four or five components, only deploy four or five components when you need that fifth one, bring it on, bring it online when you're ready, You know, looking at this cabinet.

I think part of it also is, you know, the old saying you can't make wine before it's time. Right? That's the Commercial.

I agree. Uh, yeah, that resonates. Yeah.

There's a time for that. The, the advantages of the OpenStack platform alarming with the needs in the market. And I think in today's world where it's much more calming not to put all your eggs in one basket, where you have hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, anything cloud anywhere, cloud, you know, AI cloud and everything.

Oh, yeah. Uh, OpenStack kinda lends itself Well, and that for the very reasons that you brought up it, it's modular, it's portable, it's not, you don't have to buy, you don't have to install the whole heavy thing. You can take what you need from it.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, like that, Move it around that way.

I have a computer screen behind me that's my OpenStack cloud silent is running there. It's a small little environment, right? But I also have it running, um, on seven data centers worldwide on our, our OpenStack public cloud.

Right? Right. And so, uh, it's as small as you need it to be, and as large as you want it to want It to be.

Yeah. That, and that, that goes back to the original cloud elasticity thing, right? That's what was really attractive.

So you guys have come out with some new enterprise product offering still around this? We have, yes. Talk a little about that if you can.

So the enterprise product offering is, is, I mean, it's, it's the continuation of what our, uh, existing private cloud system and business was, right? And it's really, like I said, the, the, the bedrock of what our, uh, new product strategy is in terms of what we're doing with OpenStack. And so OpenStack enterprise is the first release that there are many, well, you know, I will talk about all of the things that were coming out down the pipe 'cause we have a nice roadmap coming, but, uh, enterprise, Yeah.

Otherwise there's no reason to bring you back on. That's right. Yeah.

I'm, I'm already, I'm already foreshadowing, you know, trying to come back, you know, trying to, trying to, yeah. But, uh, anyways, the, uh, we have a, a, a, a nice roadmap plan for all of our, our different OpenStack products and enterprise is really the foundation of that. And so, you know, we're taking our private cloud and making it public.

Like we're, we're making our, our, our private cloud systems and solutions that have always been built on top of our open infrastructure, right? On our OpenStack ansible and our open infrastructure capabilities and building that out. But now we're, we're, we're really just trying to take it to the next level.

And so our enterprise product offering is, is, is new. It's exciting, but, uh, it, it really is just the foundational, we're just now getting started. I love it.

Yeah. Um, you know, a lot of stuff today talks a lot of people today talking about cloud native, totally. Kubernetes containers, OpenStack in, in, in a cloud native environment, peanut butter and chocolate or something else Like Nutella, right?

You know, you Tell Yeah. No, it's, it's, it's great. Um, I mean, well, I think there's a stat that it's something like, uh, 80% of OpenStack environments are running some form of cloud native applications, be it, okay.

You know, but, or CoreOS or full fledged Kubernetes, right? So it's, yeah. Uh, OpenStack is, is really well-suited to operate in, in a Kubernetes like environment.

And I think what's really, uh, you know, telling or, or, or fantastic about the OpenStack capabilities is that it doesn't really matter if you wanna run it in a virtualized world, right? Where I'm not shoehorning your applications to be virtualized. I'm also not telling you that your applications have to be containerized.

OpenStack can do bare metal virtualization or containers, um, and it can do all, you know, all three of them simultaneously, and you can kind of mix and match. So when you're ready for cloud native applications on BareMetal, OpenStack, ironic, you want cloud native applications in virtualized workloads, the Z Nova, and if you just want containers, and I don't wanna know about anything else, Magnum is there, right? And so those are three projects.

There are more, right? We, we can talk about more, like there's a ton more Zoom and, uh, yeah. Uh, other applications that, uh, that OpenStack provides.

But, you know, uh, those are those three, you know, pillars let you kind of decide on where you wanna run your cloud native applications. And Kubernetes fits really well in OpenStack the, you know, from the network tology capabilities to the compute environment, capabilities, storage environments. Um, it, it just, it works extremely well.

Yeah. We're, we're running low on time. I want to just tie up a couple of things in my mind here.

Yeah, yeah. Number one, you mentioned the foundation that, is it the Open Stack Foundation or the Open Infrastructure Foundation? It's the Open Infrastructure Foundation.

And they're the folks that kind of actually manage all the, the project, if you Will. They are, yes. And Rackspace is now, I, I guess you guys are one of the founding members, but, and we are reaffirming the commitment and Yep.

Be actively involved there. We are, we are. Yeah.

Yes, we are the, we are one of the founding members. Um, and, uh, you know, we are coming back swinging, um, as a, as a, uh, a very strong member of the, uh, open, uh, open infra foundation itself. And so yeah, we are, we're working through those, uh, those, those, those processes right now.

But, uh, like I said, uh, future press releases, we'll be talking about, uh, exactly our, uh, what those commitments are in, into the foundation. But just rest assured, we are huge, you know, uh, coming back, swinging into the Open Infrastructure Foundation. Love it.

Yeah. People who wanna get more information about OpenStack, maybe some of these new enterprise product offerings, where, where should they go? com.

We have a, a whole bunch of new material that is being pushed out there for our private cloud environment. You know, uh, we, we, we actually have people who answer the phone. So give us a call, um, the, uh, you can Actually call.

Yeah, you can actually call. Uh, but, uh, but I mean, on our website, we have a ton of information about, uh, what we're doing with OpenStack, our OpenStack infra foundation, our case studies that were linked into our press releases, you know, talking about our capabilities there. Um, we're having, we are producing more content out there.

Um, also, if, if you really want to dig into the code, right? For our technical audience out there, you can take a look at our, our, our GitHub profiles, right? com/record labs.

Um, we are pushing everything into the open ecosystems, even if it isn't into those, you know, foundation platforms. We're open sourcing our solutions. And like I said, you know, earlier we're, you know, we're, we're taking our enterprise private cloud and making it public.

And so everything is, is out there. It's all out on the open, and we are, you know, like committing to the open source ecosystem at large in a, in a really big way. So, you know, you can reach out to us, um, you can find myself online, you know, on, on, uh, on, on the various socials or reach out to me on LinkedIn.

Um, or, uh, yeah, like I said, uh, give us a call. We're there. Excellent.

Yeah, Kevin, thanks for coming on. Now, you've committed yourself to coming back on and telling us as more, I'm ready. More of this open stack, uh, story comes to light in the Open Infrastructure Foundation.

But in the meantime, though, best of luck to you and the folks in Rackspace. It's good to have you back here. Thank you so much.

You know, in open, in OpenStack and, and leading the charge. Good stuff. I, I really appreciate it.

Thank you again for having me on. Uh, you know, uh, this has been really fun. And, uh, I do, I, I'm looking forward to us, us chatting again.

Very cool. Thank you. Kevin Carter, product director for the OpenStack, uh, product offering over at Rackspace.

Rackspace Technology here on Tech Trunk. We're gonna take a break. We'll be back.