This week’s OpenStack Summit, brought to you live by SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE, is being held at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta. In this interview, Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Ubuntu, joins theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Stu Miniman.

• OpenStack: The beginning of the next wave of innovation

After first sharing the historical fact that Shuttleworth is theCUBE’s first ever guest to have been to outer space, Furrier started the interview by asking his take on OpenStack.

“OpenStack is the bearing fruit of taking Linux from the individual node up to the cluster into the cloud,” replied Shuttleworth. He went on to say that the OpenStack Summit is where the future of infrastructure is being defined, calling it a springboard for the next generation of computing at scale. Shuttleworth added that OpenStack is the beginning of the next wave of innovation.

Following this, Furrier began discussing OpenStack’s value and questioned Shuttleworth on what disruption looks like in terms of value creation. Shuttleworth started off saying that the value isn’t in the obvious places and that the real value isn’t there because, in part, there are too many people chasing them.

He then went on to refer to this as the “fog of disruption” explaining that you know instinctively that it’s a profound change, but it’s difficult to identify where the great new companies will come from. In his point of view, we need an open platform, as OpenStack depends on a healthy ecosystem to succeed.

Miniman then entered the discussion and asked Shuttleworth what Ubuntu’s role is in moving forward for OpenStack. Shuttleworth said that, today, the major production clouds are on Ubuntu, and his company provides technical support on commercial terms to the world’s biggest OpenStack deployments. He also explained that Ubuntu has done a lot of work across all of the Linux distributions and Windows, making OpenStack on Ubuntu great for “running workloads you care about.”

Advice on OpenStack

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Furrier went on to ask Shuttleworth his advice for newbies to OpenStack. Shuttleworth responded that you need to have an OpenStack story as well an “OpenStory” that doesn’t depend on winning everything, meaning that you need have a clear idea of how you’re existing portfolio maps into OpenStack and an idea of how much OpenStack changes the world. “There’s a lot of value to be had. It’s just further up along the stack,” said Shuttleworth.

• Leadership and competition

Following that, Miniman asked Shuttleworth how OpenStack can move forward without any clear leaders. Shuttleworth said that “nobody cares about an open source project until it is, in fact, well-grounded,” and then that project establishes ground rules as well as its core leaders during that time of formation. On the flip side, OpenStack became an industry focus before it existed as a project. Shuttleworth thinks that there are challenges to this, but nothing that would really derail OpenStack.

Furrier then asked Shuttleworth about the OpenStack competition and whether it should be a land-grab or if everyone should just be fine with being a part of OpenStack.

He responded saying that “a healthy ecosystem requires a diverse perspective,” and that it’s great that OpenShift exists. Shuttleworth also believes that there’s still a lot of room for innovation, creativity and diversity.

• NextGen developers & the IT of the future

Furrier then went on to discuss the new generation of developers and asked Shuttleworth how it’s changed and what is still changing. He said that the next generation isn’t interested in building things from scratch and that they’d rather consume best practices, pull it together and then quickly spin up their production operating sites. Shuttleworth added that, “Juju gives the ability to tap into crowd source, operational and code excellence and then spin it up on any cloud at any scale you like.”

Considering how much OpenStack is changing the make-up of the IT staff, Miniman then asked Shuttleworth what the IT staff of the future will look like. Shuttleworth said that there’s always demand for people who understand the stack, but that there will be pressure on people to obtain new skills.

The growth of Ubuntu

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Furrier then asked Shuttleworth where he sees the business growing. He said that Ubuntu’s commercial technical support to the largest deployments of OpenStack and other distributed infrastructures is growing, adding that the majority of the large commercial deployments at OpenStack Summit are on and supported by Ubuntu. He mentioned that they will see new layers of commercial opportunities as people move up the stack and focus more on what they get done with the cloud.

Closing out the interview, Furrier asked Shuttleworth what people should be watching out for in terms of where there could potentially be smoke and fire within the OpenStack movement. Shuttleworth responded saying that there aren’t any issues at the OpenStack level, but sees that the risk is spending too much time staring at perceived competitors. “You don’t create greatness out of being afraid of what someone else is doing,” said Shuttleworth.