>>Hello, welcome to the Cube here in Palo Alto, California. We're here for a preview of Ansible Fest 2022 this year in Chicago, in Person. And I'm here with Andreas. I've been on Craus, who's a senior manager for Ansible Technical Marketing at Red Hat. And just great to see you Cube alumni. Thanks for coming on and giving us a preview of what to expect at Ansible Fest. Thanks. >>No problem. Thanks for having us and thanks for everyone tuning in. >>You know, one of the things that's exciting this year is one, it's back in person from 2019 was the last in person Ansible Fest. Always a great event for folks doing it. Cloud native configuration management and automation, I think, and last year in our virtual event was the three things where automation, automation, automation kind of drove the point home. This year it's, it's more exciting than ever because if you look at the growth of Cloud Native, we're seeing a lot more traction in mainstream enterprises with Kubernetes. And obviously containers continue to grow with open source, powering everything under the coverage. So like this has like become such a whole nother inflection point this year more than ever. There's a focus on not just automation, but where the dots are gonna connect into the future. So I'd like to get your thoughts on what we're gonna expect this year at Ansible Fest. What's the themes? What do you, what do you see coming down the pike? What can people expect, >>People can really expect? Thanks. Thanks very much John. Really excited. So we're gonna see a lot of what we've seen before, right? So a little difference is from the previous onsite Ansel Fest is, I think we no longer have to say, you know, what's Ansible? We typically have had to say, you know, what is this Ansible thing? I don't know what this is. This is automation. I think we've gone beyond that and this is great. Ansible itself is now the defacto, what we believe is the de facto kind of automation language and Ansible automation platform is the defacto automation platform. So as you move into this year, we we're gonna be able to see, be able to really hone in on really having those beginners starting off much, much more quickly. But also those that have no and love Ansible for over the years to take that automation to the next level to, to new areas. Either new domains going beyond the data center, into the cloud, and then going beyond by all the partner certifications, integrations that we have. So it's a lot, it's just more of, of everything I think. So it's more for everyone all the time. So it's not, it's you, it's, it's no longer kind of a beginner's for everything, but we go all the way to kind of crawl, walk, run for this one. >>You know, it always surprises me every year, I'm always surprised by how great open source I remember every year. It's like, pinch me, This is amazing. If you're a developer right now, it's a good time to be coding because of open source growth is, is at an all time high, continues to grow, more projects are emerging. DevOps, which really came out of the ethos of the kind of the early days of the cloud and, and and scaling infrastructure was, was about infrastructure as code, which was the dream we all had in the late two thousands. If you remember right now that's happened. DevOps is now in the C I C D pipeline. Developers are shifting. Left cloud native hybrid actually now is a steady state and that's pretty well documented. What, what's next beyond infrastructures code? What's beyond the on premise cloud integration from a, from a, from a tech standpoint, what are you guys seeing around infrastructures, code, what's next and then what's beyond on premise? >>I think the big thing is scale, right? So we've always been able to kind of automate people, developers, as you said, DevOps, you can automate from your laptop, you can open up your laptop, download some open source Ansible and you know, automate your windows, your Linux, your network, no problem. But how do you actually operationalize that in an enterprise way across large teams, right? A global environment and then being able to like actually secure that, right? Security is such a big, sp a big piece of that now. So being able to actually apply automation securely in secure environments. So, and wrap all of that around cloud, right? So we've always been talking about a, you, you mentioned it on premises going into the cloud, right? So being able to operationalize in the cloud. So being able to automate cloud targets. So being able to automate aws, Azure GCP targets, but also running your automation on the cloud like say OpenShift. So being able to dynamically load load balance, create execution on demand for Ansible in OpenShift. So it's kind of hard and we, we hope that an Ansible fest will be able to kind of like demystify that from like when you hear, when you hear the word cloud and, and cloud native and hybrid cloud, it kind of goes in your head. We hope to kind of clear that up for folks at, at the fest. >>Certainly we're gonna talk about Super Cloud as well with the cube there. I wanna hear your thoughts real quick on the edge. You know, we gonna hear anything about the edge. This, this year, again, Edge has become hugely important, but yet it's not clear to a lot of people what that looks like. Are we gonna hear anything there? >>Absolutely. Edges is huge. And to some people I will say that when, when you say edge automation, it may not click to some folks, but if you were to say automating wireless access points in a branch office, you thinking, oh, okay, I can't now I know what you're talking about. Right? So a lot of people really may not have made the connection to what Edge Automation is because we, you know, maybe that hasn't been defined. And as we start moving into edge automation, we can start talking about extending, right? We're already talking about extending the data center, especially for network automation. So network automation no longer is in data center. You can now extend that out to the branch office to campus Wireless, right? And you can also extend that out into other areas such as industrial applications, right? If you wanna move a glue gun from one end of the warehouse to the other, you know, that has to be automated and we'll be able to be able to do that by means of some of the enhancements we made for that. >>What can customers and attendees who are gonna be there either in person and after remote hybrid expect us hear about Ansible's automation platform this year? What's gonna be some of the announcements? Can you tease a little bit out on what >>I can tease a little bit? Yeah. You know, day one's gonna be more of making me upleveling what you have today. I think you're gonna see some of the, the futures, right? A lot of the things around Edge, you'll hear something called event driven automation. So you, this is, this is very akin to maybe self-driving or self-healing or, you know, being able to automatically say event is triggered and then you can actually cause some automation to be spun up to actually remediate those things. So going beyond observability, right? Observability is great, but just observing problems is, is, you know, I can look at a million things wrong in my network, but if they're not being remediated, you know, it doesn't really mean much. So, you know, talking about event driven there is gonna be really hot. And then a lot of the other use cases in frameworks, you know, going beyond the configuration, I think, yeah, >>I think they develop things. Cool. And, and final question for you, because one of the things that last year we came away with was automation. What's that next automation at scale. Because remember, you know, we remember where we came from writing scripts, automating things from just basic scripting and, and configuration automation to full scale automation. That's become a big part and we see a lot of that in the cloud. Native conversations with containers and whatnot. How do you scale at, at, at, in the cloud with the cloud na hyperscalers. So again, the relationship with the hyperscalers and scale, what can we expect to hear there? >>Oh, everything from, so we'll be teasing out a little bit. You, you know that we have Ansible automation platform on Azure as a marketplace offering. We may be extending that to maybe some other hyperscalers. So making it super easy for customers or prospects to get automating quickly in their hyperscaler of choice, using their own means and, and, and methods and processes. And then going beyond that and ensuring security. So I mess in security again, how do you ensure that what you're in, what you're actually automating is part of like a security supply chain is part of your content or part of your playbooks and keeping things actually running well at scale, like you said, >>Okay, you got Azure, I'll put, I'll put my guessing hat on. There's only a few others in the pull from. That's awesome. Congratulations. And looking forward to the event, final word here. What's, what's, what do you see outcome at the end of the event? What's gonna, what's in your mind's eye? What's the, what's the outcome look like? >>Yeah, I, I just gotta do a shameless plug. I'm actually running the labs and workshops. So if you're in person or if you're not, you know, come check out the labs and workshops. We have four rooms. You can just camp out and just do hands on learning with workshop instructor led learnings or self-paced training. You can see me and all that. But I think the future learnings here is really trying to futureproof everyone's use cases. So actually, you know, you talk about ai, you talk about Cloud native, talking about other Red Hat products being, being part of that conversation with re and OpenShift, it's really a great time to, to be automating right now. >>And it's interesting. And the Ansible community that's well, well known. They all know each other and it's, it, I won't say niche, it's not niche anymore. It used to be one of those areas where super important for making things run now we need to take cloud and cloud scale. Horizontal scalability across multiple environments is kind of an Ansible thing, right? It's like you need to think about how to scale the Ansible concept. And I think that's the big exciting thing that I see with Cloud Native Andrews is this idea that, you know, what Ansible stood for back then now applies to almost all environments. So the automation, the scaling of, of, of configurations and tearing stuff down and standing things up with machines and software is just, I think, an incredible opportunity. And I think it operations is now in the developer's hands and data and security ops are front and center in, in all these conversations. And it's gonna be super exciting. Can't wait to, can't wait to hear. Okay. Thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it. Thanks for, for giving your opinion. >>All right. I appreciate it. Thank you very much for hosting us. See you and we'll see you there in Chicago. >>Okay. Andrew's been a creative senior manager and it's potential marketing to breaking it down, getting the preview on what's coming, expect to hear more about automation and how it's relevant at scale and, and all new things are happening with cloud native inflection point. We're living right now. So we'll see you there. Thanks for watching.

>>Live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the cube covering Ansible Fest 2019 brought to you by red hat. >>Welcome back everyone. That's the cubes live coverage for two days here in Atlanta, Georgia for Ansible Fest. I'm John fire with my cohost, stupid man. Andrew has been, Oh Kratos who's here and senior principal product manager at Ansible. Welcome to the cube. Welcome back. Thank you. Good to see you. 2017 you were last on red hat summit. It's like, Oh it was a, it was basically the introduction to the Ansible network basically. So, so much has gone on. One of the things I'm really impressed by this event and why we're here is um, configuration management and super important part of the plumbing. We all know dev ops is infrastructure as code, but as the evolution of cloud and software is changing the game, you start to see visibility into where automation's coming in. This is the whole focus of the event automation for all. It's the theme w w and this is about the core infrastructure. >>So it's not like it's just a random thing. Six most popular in get hub project out of millions. This is real. It's real. It's quite real and especially on the network side. This is something that came out organically. The birth of Ansible network was because it was agent lists, honestly, you know, simple, powerful agent lists. The agent list piece was the piece that really made it really fly for Ansible. Configuration management. By the way, on net networking side when we talked about this before is the most important because that's where it's the most static has one of those where it's been most static. I mean we all know networking, right? But as networking becomes policy base and moves up the stack, we've seen some firms like Cisco trying to figure out their dev net. It's like you starting to see the networking mindset moving up the stack. >>This is super huge change. It's a huge change. But the nice thing is that it's easy to get into. So all the network operators and network engineers, they're still used to using command and config modules with their iOS devices, their iOS devices, Juniper, all those things, right? They don't have to throw away everything they've learned for the past 10 15 years in order to get with Ansible. And then when they go beyond that, then they can start seeing the real power of the platform, which we announced today. So going from command line to programmability is kind of what's happening. Yes, absolutely. And what's the big four, the big key factors right now that are driving this? So a lot of key factors are, I mean, you saw the keynote this morning with Microsoft, that's our, that was a huge, and it'd been doing this for about two years. >>So they started from, from nothing. He chose Ansible and they quickly saw that the power of automation for the networks, but they had to grow it at scale. So that was the big problem was how do we do this at scale while still using all the knowledge that we've learned? So day zero, day one, it's extremely important and obviously we know that, but as we were going down the journey with them from a engineering standpoint, day two became extremely important. And that's what we're, we're focused on now. You know, uh, it was really interesting. Microsoft really talked about that cultural shift. Uh, you know, we've heard in the networking space forever, it was like you're all going to need to become coders. You're going to need to be able to do this to tell us how Ansible is really impacting some of those cultural shifts in a, you know, how is that discussion changed today versus what it might've been a few years ago? >>It's truly half the battle is the culture I like to call it as everyone's talking about digital transformation in a network world, this is an analog transformation in all honesty. This isn't anything about the bits and bytes. You cannot automate anything today. There are lots of point tools to automate networks today, but how are you gonna actually move that into a world where culturally you can have people buy in from the bottom up organically as well as from the top down from the it managers. It's extremely important. So on the platform announcement, the key and as was the Ansible automation platform, where can you just help us understand the relationship between network automation and the automation platform? Because I'll see an you need to move things around the network, but there's a lot of other things being configured as well and automated. What's the relationship between the two? >>So before we had the platform actually ends well network was an actual product. It was a separate skew as a separate offering and we treated it as such as a platform. We were like the first Guinea pigs I like to think of, we were the ones that said let's treat Ansible as a platform and let's move it that way. So we actually went out and built roles. We built modules, we built a network engine, which is a parser, right? Similar like text, FSM, uh, you know, those kinds of things. We put those in galaxy 22,000 downloads later. We proved it. We know that everything that we're doing in galaxy today for Ansible network proves the fact that people are using it as a platform. And we were successful in that, doing that and then telling me yours was that just track record wise, what was it, how many years? >>Oh, that was a year. So to.seven was when we released network engine for parsing, parsing CLI commands, you know, and that moves into the next generation of what we call the day two operations for networking is typically we see network configuration has been a one way street. So you would pull a configuration data from a device, you would have to parse it, you put it in SCM, it's an an SCM and now you actually have to put into a template and then you push it. Right. This has been a one way street typically, and it's an Ansible has been very good at one way streets, but now we're moving towards an Ansible two. Dot nine coming soon is making that a two way street. So integrating the fat collection from module, so when you pull facts from iOS, EOS and XLS, et cetera, treating that data consistently across the board and using that for it. >>Networking is one of the tracks here at this show. What are, what are some of the more popular things? What, what, what? Where's the focus? The focus is, it's across the board. Again, you have people that are it managers that have been doing Ansible for years and now they're saying, Hey look, they're seeing network automation is extremely pervasive. How can we get that into our pipeline? We have ticketing systems. How can we integrate ancil network with our larger business processes? And then tops like top five use cases, the typical backing up systems, uh, from, uh, you know, backup, restore a, and then doing a lot of sorts of true things there too. So making sure that you have all of your, your network configuration data off the box, right? A lot of people are fetching configurations from thousands and thousands devices. That's pretty hard to do. So let's make that easier for them. >>What's been the customer interest and the growth path for network automation? Because I'll see, that makes sense. I see a different product, but now that the automation picture's getting wider and bigger, what's the interest from customers say? The key focus area though on that? Well, we've typically focused on to date and, and from the marketing slides is the number of platforms we've supported. We can always see up to the right, right. We support 10 platforms, 2030, we're up to 65 platform supported. I think we've pretty much proven the fact that I think we can pretty much work on anything. So it's going beyond that and making lives easier for the network operators, engineers holistically. And this event here, what's going on here for you guys here? What specific tracks are doing? Right? So we're actually conversations you having. Yeah, we're talking more about the actual resource modules that are coming in two dot nine I was talking about, which is bringing fact collection and the modules together as a two way street. >>So as people start moving into this day two operations, um, we have a lot of experts here and they're hitting stumbling blocks around. They're managing ginger temp like 500 lines into templates, like on a daily basis. Nobody wants to do that. So we're getting to a place where the people that are really relying on Ansible in it, in the expert field, making it much, much easier for them to look forward. We had Greg on earlier. And um, Robin, they talk about the glue layer that Ansible provides for the folks that are not using Ansible, what's the big message that you'd like to send them? What's the, what's the real, uh, attraction from the customers and why should people be using Ansible? Well, it, yeah, I mean it's, it, it's for everything. I mean, you don't have to, you really don't. I mean, it, it speaks for itself, but it breaks down the barriers. >>If you're a server person, a restorative person or a cloud person or a windows person or a network person, you all have the same language base in Ansible and you can get things done more quickly and more efficiently that way. So one of the other things we were talking to the community about is the, the feedback loops that you have with the community to tell us a little bit about what your teams hoping to get from the users attending and barges. Oh, absolutely. On the animal network side, everything is done transparently in the community. We have weekly, we have a community meetup. We've had this for a long time. Everything's out in the open. Everything's in get hub. Everything that we've done, we've had a contributor day. I don't know if you were here on Monday, it was focused on network. We're pitching this idea around resource modules in the, in the forward strategy of, of the platform as it relates to network, everyone including the contributors, developers, the partners, all of the people that you could see that half the off half the vendors here on the floor, our network partners. >>So they're invested as well. They want this to succeed. So we're extremely proud and happy that they're along for the ride as well. Alright. Maybe explain to our audience what an angry potato is. Uh, it's a, was it a tater, it's an angry tater. Uh, yeah, it's a, the mascot for AWX I believe. And um, yeah, they're fun. The stickers and little plushes. So we're going back to keep sticking appreciation. What's the coolest thing that you're, you've seen this year that you think people should know about? Oh, wow. Um, I think a lot of, a lot of focus around testing and development. So a lot of developers are now writing code. They're rebuilding the wheel themselves. So developers are writing the same stuff over and over and over again. So how can we scale that to say, Hey, why don't we all get together and write the same code and then about testing. >>So once you actually have the code, you have a lot of vendors here on CIC, D testing quality. So we at its Ansible, um, we can talk, and this was Greg, I don't know if you mentioned earlier, but Greg to go into Sprig said, you know, we're really good at making sure, um, playbooks and roles and modules are correct, but we want to make sure that the vendors and the developers like focused on the functionality. We can give them guidance around, um, syntax and correctness, but we want to make sure that the innovation really comes from them. Andrea, talk about this annual Fest this year, 2019 as we run into 2020 coming up towards the end of the year, fall here. Why is this year different? What's important about this year? Um, this seems to be, this almost seems to be an inflection point this year. Why? Why is it so important as what's what's going on right now that makes this event so popular? >>You're seeing convergence in a lot of different activities. The, the silos around you typically say, I'm a, I'm a, you know, I'm, I do Kubernetes or I do network or I do cloud. You're starting to see a lot of these people like, okay, well I have to do a cloud. I have to do a cloud VPN connection using containers and automate the network. So you're starting to see a lot of these different traditional people having to think outside of their traditional areas and have to start thinking about other areas to their, whatever that whatever their technology silo is in their head, they have to start learning or they're being forced to learn around a lot of different things. It's a systems architecture. Absolutely. System says consequences. You can't just dig in the silo. That's the issue. Absolutely. That seems to be the core issue. And also culturally it's collaborative. I mean, who would have thought configuration management be the next social network for enterprises at turning it out to be, yeah, absolutely. Not social network. Literally like Facebook, but you know, thanks to come on. Thank you so much for having said, we're bringing all the action down here at Asheville Fest where dev ops is being operationalized cultural change within organizations, but keep abilities much more of a systems view now. So the networking is a key part of it. I'm John for a stupid man back after this short break.

>> Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform >> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCube Covering Red Hat Summit 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back to theCube's coverage, I'm Rebecca Knight your host, here with Stu Miniman. Our guest now is Andrius Benokraitis, he is the Principle Product Manager at Ansible Red Hat Network Automation, thanks so much Andrius. >> Thanks for having me I appreciate it. >> This is your first time on the program. >> Andrius: First time. >> We're nice, >> Really nervous, so, okay. we don't bite. >> Start a little bit with your new to the company relatively >> Andrius: Relatively. >> networking guy by background, can you give us a little bit about your background. >> Sure, I mean, I actually started at Red Hat in 2003. And then did about four five jobs there for about 11 years. And then jumped, went to a startup named Cumulus Networks for about two years. Great crew, and then, now I'm at Ansible, been there since about December, so working on the Network Automation Use Case for Ansible. >> Alright, so networking, has a little bit of coverage here, I remember, you know, something like the Open Daylight stuff and I have, actually there are a couple of Red Hatters that I interviewed at one show ended up forming a company that got bought by Dockers, so you know, there's definitely networking people, but maybe give us a broad view of where networking fits into this stuff that you're working on specifically. >> Yeah, sure thing. I think it's interesting to point out that as everything started in the compute side, and everything started to get disaggregated, the networking side has come along for the ride per se. It's been a little bit behind. When we talk about networking a lot of people just think automatically that's the end. And we're actually trying to think a little bit lower level, so layer one, layer two, layer three, so switching, routing, firewalls, load balancers, all those things are still required in the data center. And when people started using Ansible, it started five years ago on the compute side, a lot of the people started saying, I need to run the whole rec, and I'm not a CCIE, and I don't really know what to do there but I've been thrown in to do something, I'm a cloud admin, the new title right. I have to run the network, so what do I do. I don't know anything about networking, I'm just trying to be good enough, well, I know Ansible, so why don't I just treat switches like servers, and just treat them like, like what I know, they just have a lot more interfaces, but they just treat it that way. So a lot of the expertise came from the ground up with the opensource model and said this is the new use case. >> Well, Jay Rivers, the founder of Cumulus, it's like networking will just be a Linux operating model, you know, extended to the network, which is always like, hey, sounds like a company like Red Hat should be doing that kind of stuff. >> Exactly, it's interesting to see a Bash prompt in the networking right, it's familiar to a lot of people, in the devop space, absolutely. >> So it's a very rapidly changing time, as we know, in this digital computing age, the theme of this conference is the power of the individual, celebrating that individual, the developer, empowering the developers to take risks, be able to fail, make changes, modify. You're not a developer, but you manage developers, you lead developers, how do you work on creating that context, that Jim Whitehurst talked about today. >> I think it starts with, the true empowerment, you have the majority of the networking platforms are still proprietary and walled off, walled off gardens, they're black boxes you can't really do much with them, but you still have the ability to SSH into them, you have familiar terms and concepts from the server side in the networking side. So as long as you have SSH in the box and you know your CLI commands to make changes, you can utilize that in part of Ansible to generate larger abstractions to use the play books in order to build out your data center, with the terms and the Lexicon of YAML, the language of Ansible, things that you already know and utilizing that and going further. >> Can you speak to us a little bit about customers, you know, what's holding them back, how are you guys moving them forward to the more agile development space? >> Our customers are mostly brownfield, they're trying to extend what they already have. They have all their gear, they have everything they have that they need but they're trying to do things better. >> I don't find greenfield customers when it comes to the network side of the house, I mean we've all got what I have and we knew that IT's always additive, so, I mean that's got to be a challenge. >> It's a huge challenge. >> Something you can help with right? >> It's a huge challenge, and I think from the network operators and network engineers, a lot of them are saying, again, they're looking at their friends on the compute side, and they can spin up VMs and provision hardware instantaneously, but why does it have to take four to six weeks to provision a VLAN or get a VLAN added to a network switch? That sounds ridiculous, so a lot of the network engineers and operators are saying, well I think I can be as agile as you, so we can actually work together, using a common framework, common language with Ansible, and we can get things done, and we can get all of this stuff I hate doing, and we don't have to do that anymore, we can worry about more important things in our network, like designing the next big thing, if you want to do BGP, design your BGP infrastructure, you want to move from a layer two to a layer three or an SDN solution. >> I love that you talk about everybody, kind of the software wave and breaking down silos, network and storage people are like, oh my God, you're taking my job away. >> Exactly, completely, no, we're not taking your job. We are augmenting what you already have. We're giving you more tools in your tool belt to do better at your job, and that's truly it, we don't have to, people can be smarter so, if you want to add a VLAN, that can be a code snippet created by the sys admin, it can be in Git, and then the network engineer can say, oh yeah, that looks good, and then I just say, submit. What we see today with some of the customers is, yeah, I want to automate, I really want to automate, and you say, great, let's automate. But then you start getting, you peel back the onion, and you start seeing that, well, how are you managing your inventory, how are you managing your endpoints. And they're like, I have a spreadsheet? And you're like, as a networking guy I guess you, (excited clamoring) >> Networking is scary for a lot, >> It's super scary, yeah. >> So how, do you break that down? >> You do what you can, you do it in small pieces, we're not trying to change the world, we're not trying to say, you're going to go 100% devops in the network. Start small, start with something, like again, you really hate doing, if you want to change, something really low risk, things you really hate doing, just start small, low risk things. And then you can propagate that, and as you start getting confidence, and you start getting the knowledge, and the teams, and every one starts, everyone has to be bought in by the way. This is not something you just go in and say, go do it. You have to have everyone on board, the entire organization, it can't be bottom up, it can't be top down, everyone has to be on board. >> And Andrius, when I talk to people in the networking space, risk is the number one thing they're worried about. They buy on risk, they build on risk, and the problem we have with the networks, they're too many things that are manual. So if I'm typing in some you know, 16 digit hexadecimal code >> From notepad, manually you're copying and pasting >> from like a spreadsheet. Copying and pasting, or gosh, so things like that, the room for error is too high. So there's the things that we need to be able to automate, so that we don't have somebody that's tired or just, wait, was that a one or an L or an I. I don't know, so we understand that it actually should be able to reduce risk, increase security, all the things that the business is telling you. >> All these network vendors have virtual instances. You can do all your testing and deployment, all your testing and your infrastructure, and you can do everything in Jenkins and have all your networking switches, virtually, you can have your whole data center in a virtual environment if you want. So if you talk about lower risk, instead of just copying and pasting, and oh was that a slash 24 or a slash 16, oops, I mean that looked right, but it was wrong, but did it go through test, it probably didn't. And then someone's going to get paged at three in the morning, and a router's down, an edge router's down and your toast. So enabling the full devops cycle of continuous integration. So bringing in the same concepts that you have on the compute side, testing, changes, in a full cycle, and then doing that. >> You talked about the importance of buy in and also the difficulties of getting buy in. How much of that is an impediment to the innovation process, but one of the things we've been talking about, is can big companies innovate? What are the challenges that you see, and how do you overcome them? >> That is the number one, that is the biggest issue right now in the network space, is getting buy in. Whether it's someone who has done it on their own, someone can just install Ansible and do something, and then deploy a switch, but if they leave the company and there's no remediation, if it's not in the MOP, if it's not in the Method of Procedure, no one knows about it. So it has to be part of your, you want to keep all the things you have, all the good things you have today with your checks and balances in the networking, and the CIOs and the people at the top have to understand, you can keep all that stuff, but you have to buy in to the automation framework, and everyone has to be onboard to understand how it fits in in order to go from where you are today to where you want to be. >> At the show here what's exciting your customers? You know, give us a little bit of a viewpoint for people that are checking out your stuff, what to expect. >> Well I think the one thing is they're not used to seeing, they think it's black magic, they think it's just magic. They're like, I can use the same things for everything? I say, yeah, you can. The development processes, the innovation in the community, you know for example, if you want to assist, go ACI Module, it's in GitHub, it's in Cisco's GitHub, you can just go ahead and do that. Now we're trying, starting to migrate those things into core. So the more that we get innovation in the community, and that we have the vendors and the partners driving it, and you're seeing that today, you know, we have F5 here we have Cisco, we have Juniper we have Avi, all those people, you know, they have certified platforms with Ansible, Ansible Core, which is going to be integrated with Ansible Tower, we have full buy in from them. They want to meet with us and say how can we do better. How can we innovate with you to drive the nexgen data centers with our products. >> You talked about yourself as a boomerang employee, what is the value in that, and are you seeing a lot of colleagues who are bouncing around and then coming back from ... >> Absolutely, I think pre acquisition Ansible, the vast majority of the people, I believe were ex-Red Hatters that went to Ansible. So what's really nice to come back home and understand the people that left, that came back to understand already what the, >> And people feel that way, it's a coming home? >> Yeah, it's a coming home, it really is. They understand, you know, they came back, they understood the values of opensource and the culture, again, I started Red Hat in 2003, I see the great things, I see new people getting hired and I see the same things I saw back then, 2003, 2004, with all the great things that people are doing, and the culture. You know, Jim's done a great job at keeping the culture how it is, even way back then when there was only 400 people when I started. >> Andrius, extend that culture, I think about the network community and opensource and you know, you talk about, there's risk there, and you know, you think about, I grew up with kind of enterprise, infrastructure mentality, it's like, don't touch it, don't play with it. We always joked, I got every thing there, really don't walk by it and definitely, you know, some zip tie or duct tape's going to come apart. Are we getting better, is networking embracing this? >> Yes, for sure. I think the nice thing is you start seeing these communities pop up. You're starting to see network operators and engineers, they've been historically, if they don't know the answer, they won't go find it. They kind of may be shy, shy to ask for help, per se. >> If it wasn't on their certification, >> Exactly. >> They weren't going to do it. >> If it wasn't there I'm not going to go, we're bringing them into, so we have, whether there's slack instance, there are networking communities, networking automation, communities, just for network automation. And there's one, there's an Ansible channel, on the network decode, select channel, has almost 800 people on it. So they're coming and now they have a place, they have a safe place to ask questions. They don't have to kind of guess or say, you know what, I'm not going to do that. And know they have a safe place for network engineers, for network engineers to get into the net devop space. >> Another one of the sort of sub themes of this summit is people's data strategy, and customers and vendors, how they're dealing with the massive amounts of data that they're customers are generating. What is your data strategy, and how are you using data? >> So there's two aspects here. So the data can be the actual playbooks themselves, the actual, the golden master images, so you can pull configs from switches, and you can store them and you can use them for continuous compliance. You can say, you know, a rogue engineer might make a change, you know, configuration drift happens. But you need to be able to make those comparisons to the other versions. So we're utilizing things like Git, so you're data strategy can be in the cloud, it can be similar on your side, you can do Stash locally. For part of the operations piece, you can use that. A second piece is, log aggregation is a big piece of the Ansible. So when you actually want to make sure that a change happens, that it's been successful, and that you want to ensure continuous compliance, all that data has to go somewhere, right? So you can utilize Ansible Tower as an aggregator, you can go off using the integrations like Splunk and some other log aggregation connectors with Ansible Tower to help utilize your data strategy with the partners that are really the driving, the people that know data and data structures, so we can use them. >> And one of the other issues is the building the confidence to make decisions with all the data, are you working on that too with your team? >> Yes, we are working with that, and that's part of the larger tower organization, so it goes beyond networking. So, whatever networking gets, everyone else gets. When we started developing Ansible Core and the community and Ansible Tower in-house, we think about networking and we think about Windows, that's a huge opportunity there, you know, we're talking about AWS in the cloud. So cloud instances, these are all endpoints that Ansible can manage, and it's not just networking, so we have to make sure that all of the pieces, all of the endpoints can be managed directly. Everyone benefits from that. >> Andrius thank you so much for your time we appreciate it. >> Thanks again for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, thank you very much for joining us. We'll be back after this.