John Furrier and Dave Vellante, theCUBE co-hosts, interviewed Chris Kemp, Founder of Nebula, at the OpenStack & Enterprise Forum in Mountain View, California. The event took place on January 29, focusing on deploying OpenStack in the Next Generation Data Center.

After working for five years at NASA, Chris Kemp founded Nebula Inc. and co-founded OpenStack. Because of his extensive experience with cloud computing, open source and open government, Furrier sought his opinion on the enterprise cloud.

“We have this homebrew computer club mentality going on right now,” remarked Furrier. “But what is the big ‘a-ha!’ and what’s really hot right now?” he asked.

“Enterprise is realizing that they have some big challenges in IT and everywhere you look you have to build massive, scale-out computing infrastructure. Tim O’Reilly said it best: ‘just a few years ago no one would have imagined a company would need Google-scale compute infrastructure. Now everyone is building them.’ So you have projects like open compute – that are democratizing the hardware – and OpenStack – that are democratizing the software stack, and there will be companies like Nebula which will deliver some of this technology to the enterprise,” said Kemp.

Rethinking the way software is done

“The modern day version of what that homebrew club did for the computer revolution 30 years ago seems to be cloud computing,” proposed Furrier. Because Kemp is right in the center of that world, he asked Kemp how that world looks from the inside.

“We are at the beginning of a new generation in our computers. There was this mentality that computers were these big, large-scale systems, that primarily focused on large business problems. The personal computer disrupted that. Companies like Apple and Microsoft built these really small systems which ended up being incredibly successful. That transformed enterprise computing. If I’m building a large, enterprise-scale computer, I’m going to start using the components that exists in the PC. Now that is happening all over again,” believes Kemp.

“You have mobile phones and ARM processors and DRAM chips and flash chips that are spilling over from these consumer devices into enterprise platforms. It allows us to rethink the way we do software. It’s not just running software on one big computer, but running it on thousands, tens of thousands or hundred of thousands of small computers. I think we are at the beginning of this revolution and it will be a 25 year journey,” stated Kemp, pretty confident that 25 years from now we’re still going to have software running in a rack of VMware, and it will be the new mainframe.

Recalling the roots of OpenStack back in the days when Kemp was still with NASA, Dave Vellante asked how did Nebula came into being, and what was Kemp’s vision of it.

“When I was at NASA, we had a problem to solve. We wanted to share NASA’s vast treasure of knowledge with the American public. If we looked at how we could do that, there was not enough funding so, by partnering with Google, I had a view at how we could manage very large scale computing infrastructures. We partnered with Microsoft and we got another view at how you manage infrastructure and we ended up using these partnerships to build a prototype of a very inexpensive, scale-out computing environment,” explained Kemp.

Because the process was carried out in shipping containers and people do not like working in that environment, they ended up automating all the servers in that shipping containers, and so that OpenStack emerged out of that work.

OpenStack versus Amazon

“Having OpenStack APIs allows this community to innovate and it allows OpenStack to be something different than Amazon. What Amazon is doing, as a company, with AWS, is listening to their customers and innovating, and I think that is a valid way to look at a segment of the market – mostly small companies building new applications. OpenStack is attewmpting to bring a lot of existing technology into the enterprise. It’s fair to say there’s a different set of opportunities when you bring cloud into an enterprise and I don’t think Amazon will see those things,” confided Kemp. “Having the OpenStack APIs be discreet and innovating on an independent trajectory will create more innovation for private clouds and for competition.”

In Kemp’s opinion “both are important,” as could be Google compute engine API. In the end, it will be decided by the market.

Technology aids cultural transformation

“Is Amazon overly ambition with the enterprise? Or simply naive?” hinted Vellante. “Andy Jassy seems determined to go after that niche and he’s putting a lot of resources behind it.”

Giving large enterprises the power of a large cloud platform isn’t in Kemp’s opinion just about technology. Technology is important in order to make things possible, but “you are dealing with a cultural transformation.”

“You are dealing with a different way of thinking about building software and with a lot of existing applications that are not going to run very well in the ideal cloud architecture that we see the Amazon-style cloud companies leveraging,” said Chris Kemp.

The economical advantages of cloud are, in his point of view, tied to the ability to elastically scale up and down. “If you are not able to scale up and down your infrastructure, you are not able to take advantage of the economic benefits of the cloud,” warned Kemp. “What I think it’s brilliant about VMware’s strategy is the fact that they’re virtualizing everything: the network, the storage, the compute, creating a holodeck software.”

“Knowing what you know now, if you could go back, what would you tweak with Nebula?” asked Furrier.

“I’m very optimistic about the future,” admitted Chris Kemp. “I think there are visionary CIOs and CTOs at America’s most successful companies that understand that the only way that they are going to win is to power their most critical applications on extremely inexpensive scaled-out infrastructure. I find that there are a lot of companies out there that have CIOs working for CFOs that have big challenges to deal with – with their existing applications. They are also optimistic about where they are in their journey virtualizing all these applications. In the long term, when companies start realizing the advantage of OpenStack and Open Compute – and Nebula is going to be a part of that – you are going to have winners emerge and it won’t even be a fight,” bragged Kemp. “If I could do it all over again, I would make Nebula even less expensive and even easier and simpler. Never underestimate the power of simplicity.”

The future ecosystem

Invited to focus a little bit on the future, Chris Kemp commented: “The key is to allow the customers to run applications more easily. This ecosystem will emerge. OpenStack already has a huge ecosystem around the infrastructure. What now needs to emerge is the ecosystem around running things on infrastructure services. You are going to see every software company that ever existed solving every problem that you could imagine, rearchitected on cloud architecture. These applications will run on Nebula private cloud, on public cloud, and in both. Just watching a whole generation of software evolve to be completely dynamic and elastic is very exciting for me. Things will change when all the software that everybody runs in the enterprise runs on cloud,” forecasted Kemp.