Early in on day 3 of SiliconANGLE’s live coverage of this week’s #openstacksummit, broadcast from Atlanta on theCUBE, co-hosts Stu Miniman and John Furrier welcomed the OpenShift Community Manager for Red Hat, Diane Mueller, to discuss her work with the Platform as a Service project, OpenShift.

Mueller last appeared on theCUBE at last year’s OpenStack Summit. After welcoming her back, Furrier noted there had been many changes in that time and asked Mueller to share her unique perspective on how the space has changed and transformed over that period.

Her specific wordload within the OpenStack platform currently finds her working with the Heat orchestration tool set, priming it for a deployment within OpenShift. “We’re demonstrating how do to that,” she stated. “I think what we are seeing now is the maturity of Heat as a project.” She sees Heat making the transition into the Enterprise as well as a number of other customer sites. “Heat has been really up and coming now and becoming a real valuable asset to the OpenStack ecosystem,” she explained.

Watch the interview in its entirety here:

Miniman took the opportunity to shift the discussion to Docker, the hypervisor that received a lot of attention at the most recent Red Hat Summit. “Docker was one of the biggest discussions which seems to be one of the top things Platform as a Service is supposed to deliver,” he began. “And that is the separation of application from infrastructure so they can be managed separately. From last year in Portland to now, walk us through what’s changing in these discussions. What’s the same? Where’s the activity,” he asked.

Mueller conceded that Docker is the center of a lot of activity, especially at Red Hat. “We have engineers working with and embedded into the Docker engineering community,” she said. “We are getting Docker ready to be a first-class citizen inside of OpenShift.” One thing that really impresses Mueller about the Docker driver is the rapid growth of the available images already in its index. “The Docker index is growing at light speed,” she noted. “All of those images will be available to be deployed in OpenShift using GearD and the other orchestration tools that we are building into OpenShift and making available,” she said.

Another unique aspect of interviews on theCUBE is the solicitation of both questions and answers from some of the industries top thought leaders via the CrowdChat app. One thread posted this stated that OpenStack needed to focus on making containers first-class citizens in the ecosystem. “Any arguments against this,” read Furrier. He then sought Mueller’s opinion to an answer submitted by theCUBE alumnus Rich Miller who said, “I would make a strong statement. Without acknowledgment and real leadership in embracing containers, OpenStack will fail to gain traction.”

In response, Mueller stated, “I know at Red Hat we are doing a lot of work in the Docker community and to make Docker a first-class citizen. I think it will be a reality rather quickly.” She continued, “Docker has the momentum right now and I think the community will make it a first-class citizen.”

With only Disney and Wells Fargo stepping forward and publicly embracing OpenStack, Furrier then asked Mueller, “What’s your take on the Cloud? What’s going on at the customer level?”

“I work on the open source side and community side,” said Mueller, “so I see a parade of customers coming through.” She explained that Red Hat’s interaction with those companies might actually obfuscate their participation in the OpenStack community. “Their contributions maybe aren’t made immediately clear,” she stated. “It is for competitive advantage.”

With the steady drumbeat towards more fully automated systems, Mueller believes the next big entrepreneurial opportunity might be on the training side. She cites her work with Heat as eventually making deployment across many distributions far easier than it ever has been. As this improves, the industry will need fewer and fewer OpenStack ninjas. “I don’t want more rock stars. I want people who can deploy this stuff,” she said.

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