>> Narrator: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering AnsibleFest 2019. Brought to you by, Red Hat. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's live coverage of AnsibleFest2019, two days of wall to wall coverage, I'm Stu, and my cohost for the week is John Furrier. And happy to welcome back to the program, one of our CUBE alumni, Tim Cramer, Vice President of Engineering for Management and Automation in Red Hat. >> That's right. >> Stu: Tim, thanks so much for joining us. >> Absolutely, it's a pleasure. >> All right, so Tim it's been about four years since the acquisition. There were, some of the undercurrent here, is you know, Red Hat didn't mess things up. As a matter of fact, the community is growing quite a bit. The ecosystem is definitely robust. You know, networking and security expanding really the footprint of Ansible. So, you know, give us a little bit of the engineering side as to the big announcement, Red Hat and Ansible automation platform, you hear customers always talk about, oh I took a thousand hours and brought it down to you know, minutes of my time. Well, I think there were probably a lot of engineering hours on your team's side to get this rolling. >> Yeah, sure. With the Red Hat acquisition, the first thing that really happened when we came in was they wanted to make sure that we kept the community and that culture moving forward the way it was. We had a really good start at it, but it needed a lot of growth, and obviously that worked out pretty well. Red Hat immediately invested pretty heavily in Ansible and in the ecosystem and really helped us pop it out, right? Because that was the one thing that Red Hat's really really good at, that Ansible needed a little bit of help with. So, we saw the community just take off. We had the right kind of investment on the engineering side so that we could build up the processes and then also build that core engine really well and invest on the tower side to make that all work. The other thing that happened sort of as a byproduct, was we started getting Ansible integrated into a bunch of the other Red Hat products. And we started out with some of the other management products, right? And, I think one of the most interesting integrations that we did was on the Insight side, so Insight is our artificial intelligence automation. And what it does, is it goes out and works with RHEL especially, but it goes and does daily dumps of a bunch of information about your RHEL system, does a bunch of analysis on that and then tries to find problems or issues and then practically tell you about them. What we did then, is instead of just sending you an article telling you how to fix the problem, we thought, why don't we combine that with Ansible and then just ship you a playbook and fix the thing automatically? And then we took those two concepts, brought those together, put it with tower and with satellite and then started just, the complete cycle that would allow you to do self-fueling software. So now, we can, just by daily dumps of things, figure out what kind of problems you're having, issues, CVEs, performance problems, other things, match that in our database, figure our what our support organization has figured out in the past, then proactively give you a playbook and fix it all in one stop. >> What's the impact of customers on that feature? What's the impact of those guys? >> Well, so if you're managing a really large fleet of machines, one of the things you want to do is, you want to make sure you're staying up to date, maybe you have compliance issues, you're worried about CVEs that are coming in, or perhaps you just want to make sure that you know, you got the latest and greatest, you're tuned well, whatever it is, right? If you're managing that number of machines, you're going to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to resolve those issues manually, right? Even if you could use Ansible to do the automation, you got to know that you have the problem to begin with. So, it really connects the two sides. So it's like automating your support experience is really- >> And so what does self-healing mean in that context? It means it heals the? >> Yeah so here's an example. I can give you an example. So an example would be, there happens to be a CVE that's recently come out, you want to scan your twenty thousand machines and you want to figure out if that CVE is hitting you. So Insights would upload the information about your system, we'd know that that CVE had not been applied, that you needed to do it, it would automatically generate a playbook that would then patch your system. That would come down into satellite, satellite would then, let's say, go on and patch those systems for you. Or you could do it with tower as well. >> No human involvement? >> No human necessary, yeah, but a lot of people don't like to just let automation take over. So you still get the, I really want to do this button, that you can push. But it makes it a lot faster, so then you can- >> And the alternative is to just manually manage it? Take it in? >> Yeah, in the, I guess, pre-Ansible days, what you would do is, even if you had Insights, that was still a big win because you get the support organization's knowledge that's being automatically, a report given to you, but you get a knowledge-based article that would tell you how to go about fixing the problem. So you'd take that manually, do it yourself. Now, we just generate that playbook and (whistles) everything happens right away. >> So Tim, over the last four years or so, we've seen some massive changes in the IT landscape. So, when we go to Red Hat summit, you know, containerization had a huge impact, multi-cloud, now we understand how RHEL fits into all of these environments. The people that are managing environments, most of what they're managing isn't something that they can go touch. So how's that impacting the Ansible marketplace? >> Well, I think the biggest thing is that because there are so many various systems that you need to be able to manage, the fact that we have the ecosystem available within the Ansible community, is just, that has been the biggest part. There's no, I shouldn't say there's no way, but it would take an incredible amount of investment if we were going to take the three thousand modules we had and write those all ourselves and try to maintain those all ourselves. The community coming in and the ISVs who are the experts in those areas are actually building up all of this content and this gives then the users and customers of Ansible that capability of manage across all of those various kind of, ecosystems and hardware and VMs and containers and everything. >> Yeah, help explain how collections are going to change that relationship with the ecosystem, especially, you know, I look the cloud providers, you can't keep up with the deluge of announcements and new solutions that they're pushing out, and therefore, it would have been tough for Ansible to kind of maintain that on their own. >> Yeah, no, that's great. So really what, the way collections came about was that we had attention, between the core platform which was changing as rapidly as the modules were, and we had a desire from our customers and users, that the core platform was pretty solid. We didn't have to keep modifying that as quickly as we were. But the module and the content developers, they wanted things coming out faster. So, this was a way for us to basically give some relief in that area where we are slowing down the core engine releases and we're speeding up then, or we're allowing the people that would own the collections, to get those changes and capabilities out much more quickly. >> What are some of the priorities on the road map that you have on engineering, obviously given that feedback from the community, you got customers in the community. And now you got an ecosystem developing, at F5, you've got Native, you've got Cisco, you've got IBM, a variety of other vendors are all here and growing. Kind of new stakeholder, not a new stakeholder, still a glue layer, an integrational layer is going to attract partners. >> Right. >> What's the roadmap? What's your focus? >> Yeah, so our focus is really just now expanding that ecosystem, providing that value, giving more advanced analytics back in to Ansible. So we really have to grow out now, the automation hub itself and the analytics. >> And when you hear people say, glue layer, integration layer, it feels like a control plane, nice, security, a network as you mentioned, are areas that have been plugging in nicely and growing on the security side. What does that mean to you when you hear, integration layer, as the head of engineering, you got to build that. What does that mean? (laughs) >> Well, what it really means is having an extremely well-defined set of APIs that are really stable that you can integrate into the- and that really is a big part of our focus, and then making it very performant. >> And the feedback from the partners is, I want to control it, you want to control it, where's the win? What's the trade off with partners, because people tend to get, you know, pretty dogmatic, well I'm going to own my data, and the problem with safe security is that a lot of these tools aren't sharing date quickly enough. Real time is important, so glue layer's pretty important. >> Yeah, so, I say with the glue layer, we don't really have much conflict as with any partners or any of the other users, really. Because it is pretty solid, I would say, at this point. And we have such a great decoupling of the module development and roles, other content that's on Galaxy, from the core engine itself, right? So, for us it means that we have to allow the experts that understand those modules, the capability of being able to manage, deliver those things on their own cadence, that make sense, as long as it continues to work well with the core engine. So that's really where our focus is. >> In the architecture used and the APIs are critical. Make sure they're rock solid and get tested properly. >> Yeah, and don't change and shift on you so that you know, if you're on older versions, it ends up messing you up. >> So, I love this show, this show is really kind of a chill show, we love this show, it's kind of one of our wheelhouse shows in terms of community, we love going to the community shows, because you can get down and dirty and talk about tech, do deep dives, hallway conversations are very cool. What are some of the things you're seeing? What's the show focus this year? What should people know about AnsibleFest this year? Why is it so important? >> Well, to me, AnsibleFest is honestly my favorite event. I've been doing these for years. The first one was in New York City in 2015 and that was my first one. I think we only had about a hundred fifty, two hundred people at that. It was a pretty small show. It's just been rapidly growing ever since. And the thing I've always loved about AnsibleFest is the community of people that are here. It really is a user community. And they are in love with Ansible. They love what it can do for them. And they just want to learn more. I also have a lot of customer meetings while I'm here. And from a customer standpoint, usually the kind of feedback we get, is how can I get more Ansible usage within my organization? They'll have a pocket of it that has come up and they're really excited about it and they want to expand that to other groups. So, instead of maybe other conferences, where you're getting a lot of concerns and people want to yell at you, right? It's more of a love fest, really. >> All right, Tim can you comment on the dynamics of an engineering organization working on a product that is open source and what that project means? 'Cause, you know, we heard some feedback from the contributor summit, a lot of engagement, really good attendance from, you know, real diverse ecosystems, so give us your commentary on that. >> Yeah, I mean to be perfectly honest, right, one of the things that we are really trying to focus on is enabling the community to do more with less help from us. All right, so one of the things that's really important is you have to make sure that, as a user, you know what the rules are so that you can get your contributions in as quickly and as easily without any questions or concerns as possible. So, we've spent a lot of time on making sure that contributions can be as easily accepted as possible. And a lot of that really honestly is more process than it is anything technical. You have to know what testing levels are required in and what kind of stability do I need in my modules, and what kind of support am I expected to give on that. So, once you know what those rules are, it's easier for you to figure out how to contribute, as opposed to you think you're done, and then it gets rejected. You get frustrated, and you give up. >> Give us what you can, the nice thing about an open source project is, people know when things are coming. So, platforms announced, it's going to be GA, come November, what directionally, should we be looking for by the time we come to AnsibleFest 2020? >> AnsibleFest 2020, what I would hope to see is that we're going to have much better advanced analytics about how your organization is using Ansible internally. And even being able to compare that against other organizations and other companies that are also running. So you can see how you're doing against, let's say, your peers in the industry. That's a big one. The other one of course, is we really want to get more engagement with our partners and others that want to provide collections of content that you can trust. >> All right, any nuggets from customer discussions, either something that might not have gotten talked about on the main stage or just general feedback that you'd share? >> I think that one of the things that we hear a lot is really around the scale and what we're seeing customers do is scale Ansible out to very large levels. So I would say some of the number one requests we have are around making sure that we can scale well, having sort of high availability solutions. I think those are the main things that we get. >> All right well, Tim Cramer, thank you so much for all the updates, look forward to you know, seeing some of those enhancements that you talk about as the platform continues to mature. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from AnsibleFest 2019, for John Furrier, I'm Stu Miniman, thank you always for watching theCUBE. (techno music)