>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hey, welcome back. You're ready. Jeffrey here with the Cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of Dell Technology World 2020. The Digital Experience. I'm coming to you from Palo Alto. It's a digital event, just like everything else in 2020. But we're excited to have our next guest. I think he's coming in all the way from Atlanta, Georgia. He's Jim Shook, the director of cyber security and compliance practice at Del Technology. Jim, Great to see you. >>Thanks, Jeff. It's quite the title there. Thanks for getting all that out. >>I have a big posted notes so that, uh, that's very helpful. But, you know, it's it's actually kind of an interesting thing because you have compliance and cybersecurity and your title, and it's it's It's interesting relationship between compliance as a motivator of behavior versus you know, you need to go a lot further than just what the compliance says. So I'm curious if you can talk about that relationship between yeah, we need to be compliant, and we need to follow the rules. But you need to think a lot bigger than that. >>Yeah, definitely. I mean, there's so many different standards out there and requirements. So typically, what we'll see on the regulatory side is very much a minimum baseline, and leading the way, as usual in the cybersecurity space, will be financial and health care organizations. That's particularly true in the US, but pretty much globally, at least on the financial side. So they'll set some baselines. A lot of industries don't really have many. And so what we look at many times is just general risk to the business. And, of course, if you're a publicly traded company, that might trigger some SEC requirements or other things like that. But again, we really look at those requirements as minimum baselines, and you have to work up from there based on the organization's risk profile. >>Yeah, yeah, and we see that we see that, too, with privacy and a whole a whole bunch of stuff where traditionally the regs and the compliance kind of lag, you know where the technologies and where the markets moving. So let's before we get too deep into it. Let's let's talk about the cove it impact because obviously a huge thing. Insecurity, Uh, you know, a light switch moment in mid March when everybody had to work from home. So suddenly your tax surfaces increase exponentially. People are working out of home environments that you don't necessarily know what's going on there. Who's going on there, The shared networks with the spouse and the kids and and everybody else. And but now we're, you know, 678 months into this. This is something that's going to be going on for a while, and even the new normal will have some type of a hybrid relationship with with, you know, an increased level of remote remote work once they work from home. But it's really work from anywhere. So I wonder if you could share your thoughts about how things have transitioned from you know, what happened in mid March, taking care of your own business and your own people to, you know, then taking care of your customers and the emergencies that they had. But now really thinking in terms of more of kind of a long term, fundamental shift in the security profile that people have with all their data and information >>Yeah. Gosh, it's been really interesting. I think organizations have done an amazing job when you think about the things that they've had to get done just really overnight. So a lot has been written about the pandemic, and you mentioned Jeff to really that expanded threats surface. All of a sudden, you've got people working from home. There wasn't enough VPN capacity. A lot of places. I talked to some organizations. Employees just took their desktop off of their desk and brought it home so it wasn't really ready toe work at a remote location. But organizations really adapted well to it. Meanwhile, that was opportunity for the criminals, and they've taken it. But Jeff, one of the things that I think about two is to an extent, this is the new normal, not necessarily the work from home, but the shift that's going to consistently happen in cybersecurity. Things change. The criminals air really smart, they adapt. So that was work from home. What's the next thing going to be? There's I O T. There's remote devices. There will be some vulnerabilities. We just have to get used to this pace and continue it. Unfortunately, >>right, right, right Yeah, it's always it's always a little bit of, Ah, a cat and mouse game, Right? But what? And then one of the other trends that we're seeing, I don't know, maybe more visibility or maybe higher profile is is the ransomware attacks, right? So we've seen, you know, kind of this thing really interesting continuation of different types of security threats between just the the local kid who's just trying to do it because it's fun versus, you know, competitive stuff where people are trying to take out their competitors versus nation states and nation states being, um, you know, kind of driving these attacks. But the ransom, the ransom where we've seen before, but it seems to be increasing in frequency. Maybe we're just hearing about it. What's special about ransom, where as a specific type of security threat. >>So I started this practice about five years ago, and at that point, ransom or was just barely a blip, it was really about destruction and the way that we talk about it in the cybersecurity spaces. There's this triad, these three components of our data that we're trying to protect. So one of those is confidentiality, and that traces back to the attacks you're talking about. That's when somebody steals your data. You don't want them to do that. That breaks the confidentiality of the data. And that's really where the cybersecurity controls kind of grew up around, that you didn't want credit cards, intellectual property, healthcare information. And that's still a problem with ransom, where they're affecting the availability of the data or the integrity of the data. And those were the other two prongs that go with confidentiality. And so these attacks. That's why they feel different. Their impact in your ability to access the data, which in many cases can shut a business down. There have been headlines over the last couple of months. Some businesses that really were closed off for components of their business that were shut down, and it's because they didn't have their data or their systems, and then eventually they either found a way to recover them. Or perhaps in many cases, the speculation is they paid the ransom to get the data back, >>right. And of course, the problem with ever paying a ransom, um, is that you don't necessarily know you're going to get the data back. That you may just be encouraging them to hit you again. Eso paying the ransom is is not necessarily the best solution. And then then, in talking about this thing, turns out that in fact, not only may it not be the right solution, you may be breaking the law. This is a pretty interesting thing. I had no idea that there's really laws dictating, you know, I guess responding to a criminal threat. What? Where does that go? What's that from? >>Yeah, that's we've talked about this for a while. But it wasn't until about two weeks ago that some information was released from the Department of Treasury. So the idea here is that every not every country, many countries, the US among them have lists of countries and organizations that you can't do business with. So essentially a prohibited or sanctions list. And, as it turns out, many of the ransomware bad actors and Jeff is actually real name of one of them evil court. It sounds like a movie or a book, but that's one of the ransomware bad actors there on those lists. So if you get attacked by an organization that's on the list and you pay them. You have now completed a transaction with a prohibited entity and you're subject to potential sanctions. There was a lot written about this being a new law, or the US came up with this law, and that's not the case. The laws have been on the books for a while. It was the Department of Treasury, kind of issuing some guidance, just nudging people. Hey, by the way, you shouldn't be doing this and some of the research I've done a lot of countries have these laws. So while it's just the US that came out with this advisory, which was very public and certainly a big wake up call, these laws exist in a lot of other countries. So organizations really need to be prepared for what they're going to do if they get hit with the Ransomware attack. Not really counting on paying the ransom for the reasons that you said, Plus, it may be against the law. >>And just to make sure I understand you, it's against the law because you're effectively doing business by having a financial transaction with one of these, prohibited either organizations or they're in a prohibited country complete. >>That's correct Yeah, mostly about the organization, um, and then an interesting component of this and we won't get into too much of the weeds on the legal side. But the law is actually a strict liability. So that means it doesn't matter whether you knew or should have known that the entity was on a prohibited list. The mere fact of having that transaction makes you liable. And then the way that the the regulations are written, you can't get someone else to do your dirty work for you. So if you are facilitating that transaction anyway, you may be running afoul of those laws. >>Jesus. One more thing to worry about where you're trying to get business. You're trying to get your business back up and running, but specifically with with with ransomware and why it's different. I mean, there's been business continuity, planning forever. You know, you guys have backup and recovery solutions. Uh, you know, there's so much effort around that What's different here? Is it just because of the time in which you have to respond the availability of those backups toe to come back and get in production? What makes Ransomware so special from a business continuity perspective besides the fact that you're not allowed to pay him because it might be breaking the law. >>Ah, lot, You hit on a couple things there. So we've known forever that with D R. Disaster recovery One of the major things you're doing there is your replicating data quickly so that if you lose sight A you can pop up its site B With ransomware, you're replicating the corrupted data, so you lose that with backups. The bad guys know, just like you mentioned that if you have a backup, you could use that to recover. So they are more frequently now gathering their credentials and attacking the backup. So many cases we see the backups being deleted or otherwise destroyed. And that's really where we have focused with our power. Protect cyber recovery solution is creating a new, extra offline air gapped copy of the most critical applications. That's not going to be susceptible to the attack or the follow up attack that deletes the data. >>So let's jump into that a little bit, um, in a little bit more detailed. So this is a special solution, really targeted, um, as a defense against Ransomware because of the special attributes that ransom where, uh, e guess threatens threatens or the fact that they they also go after your backup in recovery at the same time, knowing you're gonna use that to basically lower the value of their ransom attack. That's crazy. >>Yeah, they're smart. You know, these these Attackers air smart. There's billions of dollars at stake. E think organizations like Evil Corp estimates are they could be making hundreds of millions of dollars. So they're they're not even small businesses. They're almost industries unto themselves. They have advanced tactics, They're leveraging capabilities, and they have. They have products, essentially. So when you think about your production data, your backups, your disaster recovery, those air, all in environments, that they're not accessible on the Internet. But that's where you're doing business. So there is access there. There's employees that have access, and the bad guys find ways to get in through spear phishing attacks, where they're sending emails that look like they're from somebody else and they get a foothold. Once they have that foothold, they can leverage that access to get throughout that production environment. They have access to that data, and they deleted with cyber recovery. What we're doing is we're creating a vaulted environment that's offline. They can't get there from from where they are, so they can't get access to that data. We lock it down, we analyze it, we make sure that it's good and then this happens automatically and day over day. So you've always got that copy of data. If your worst case scenario develops and you lose your production environment, that happens. You've got this copy of data for your most critical applications. You don't want to copy everything in there, but you can use to actually recover and that recover capability. Jeff is one of the pillars of a cyber security structure, so we focus a lot, kind of like you said before. What's different about these attacks? We focus a lot on protecting data and detecting bad guys. This is the recover capability that is part of all these frameworks, >>right? So there's a lot to unpack there before we get into the recovery. And kinda actually, why don't we just start there and then I want to get into the air gap because that's a great That's a great thing to dig in on the recovery what's kind of your targeted s l A Is it based on the size of the application? Um, is it based on on, you know, a different level of service. I mean, what is what is the hope? If I buy into this this solution that I can get my recovery and get back into business if I choose, not toe to pay these guys? What? What does it? What does that kind of look like? >>Most of the time, we're providing a product that our customers are deploying, and then we have some partners that will deployed as a service to, so the SLS may vary, but what we're targeting is a very secure environment, and you can look at how it's architected and think about the technologies. If it's properly operated, you can't get there. You can't get to the data. So the points that we're really looking at is how frequently do we want to update that data? So in other words, how much data can you afford to lose? And then how long will it take you to recover? And both of those? You can leverage the technologies to shorten those up to kind of your requirements. So loosely speaking, the in the shorter you make the time may cost you a little bit more money, a little bit more effort. But you can tighten those up pretty much what your requirements are going to be, >>right? Right? And then let's talk about air gaps because air gaps. That means something very, very specific. It literally means classically right, an air gap. There is a space in between these systems until electrons learn how to jump. Um, they're they're they're physically separated. Um, but that's harder and harder to do, right, because everything is now a P I based, and everything is an app that's based on a bunch of other APS, and there's calls and there's, you know, everything is so interconnected now. But you talked about something specifically said, an automated air gap. And you also said that you know, we're putting this data where it is not connected for some period of time. So I wonder if you could explain a little bit more detail how that works, how it's usually configured, um t to reintroduce an air gap into this crazy connected world. >>Yeah, it's kind of going backward to go forward in a lot of ways. When we're careful about the term, we'll use the term logical air gap because you're right, Jeff on Air Gap is there's a gap, and what we're doing is we're manipulating that air gap in a way that most of the time that data are are safe. Data are vaulted, data is on the other side of the air gap, so you can't get there. But we'll bring it up in air. Gap will logically enable that air gap so that there is a connection which enables us to update the data that's in the vault, and then we'll bring that connection back down. And the way that we've architected the solution is that even when it's enabled like that, we've minimized the capability to get into the vault. So, really, if you're a bad actor, if you know everything that's going on, you might be able to prevent the update. But you can't get into the vault unless you're physically there. And, of course, we put some controls on that so that even insiders are very limited what they can do if they get inside the vault and the A. P. T s, the advanced persistent threats. People who are coming from other countries. Since they're not physically there, they can't access that data. >>That's good. So it's on its off, but it's usually off most of the time, so the bad guys can't get across there. >>Yeah, and again it's It's important that even when it's on it za minimal exposure there. So you think about our triad, the confidentiality, integrity, availability. You know, we're blocking them from getting in so they can maybe do a denial of service type of attack. But that's it. They can't get into break into the vault and break things and destroy the data like they would in production. >>I want to shift gears a little bit gym, and I've I've gone to our essay, I think, for the last three or four years of fact, I think it was the last big live event we did in 2020 before everything came to a screeching halt. And, you know, one of the things I find interesting about the security industry is this one of these opportunities for cooperative Shin um within the security industry that even though you might work for a company that competes with another company. You know there's opportunities to work with your peers at other companies. So you have more of a unified front against the bad guys as well as learn from what's going on. Uh, with some of the other you know, people. So you can learn from the from the attacks that they're surfacing. There's interesting, uh, organization called Sheltered Harbor that it came across and doing research for this. You guys have joined it. It was basically it looks like it was built around 100 30. This this article is from earlier in the years. Probably groaning is from February 130 participating financial institutions, which collectively hold 72% of all deposit accounts and 71% of all U. S retail brokerage assets. It's a big organization focused on security, Del joined not as a financial institution but as a vendor. I wonder if you can share what this organizations all about. Why did you guys join and what? Where you see some of the benefits both for you as well as your customers? >>Yeah, there's a lot there, Jeff. I've been part of that process for a little bit over two years and kicked it off after we identified. Sheltered Harbor is an organization that we wanted to work with. So, as you said, founded by some of the banks and credit unions and other financial institutions in the US, and what's unique about it is it's designed to protect the U. S. Financial system and consumer confidence. It's not actually designed to protect the bank. So of course, that's an outcome there if you're protecting consumer confidence than it's better for the banks. But that's really the goal. And so it's a standards based organization that looked at the problem of what happens if a bank it's attacked, what happens to the customers. So they actually came up with the specifications, which follows so closely to what we do with cyber recovery. They identified important data. They built requirements, not technologies, but capabilities that a vault would need to have to protect that data. And then the process is to recover that data if an event occurred. So we talked to the team for a while. We're very proud of what we've been able to accomplish with them is the only solution provider in their advisory program, and the work that we've done with the power protect cyber recovery solution. We have some more news coming out. I'm not permitted toe announce it yet. It's pretty soon, so stay tuned, and it's just been a really great initiative for us to work with, and the team over there is fantastic. >>So I just one or two. If you can share your thoughts as as the role of security has changed over the last several years from, you know, kind of a perimeter based point of view and you know, protection and walls and, uh, firewalls and and and all these things which is completely broken down now to more of a integrated security approach and baking security into your data to your encryption to your applications, your access devices, etcetera and really integrating security more into the broader flow of product development and and delivery and and how that's impacted the security of the of the customers and impacted professionals like you that are trying to look down the road and get ahead of the next. You know, kind of two or three bad things that are coming. How is that security posture really benefited everybody out there? >>It gets a really difficult problem that we just keep working at it again. We don't have a goal, because if we're targeting here, the threat actors is a bad actors. They're gonna be here. I was reading an article today about how they're already the bad actors already employing machine learning to improve what they're doing and how they target their phishing attacks and things like that. So thinking about things like security by design is great. We have millions billions of devices, and if we start from the ground up that those devices have security built in, it makes the rest of the job a lot easier. But that whole integration process is really important to I mentioned before the recovery capability and protect and detect Well, if you look at the nice cybersecurity framework has five pillars that have capabilities within each one, and we need to keep focusing on our capabilities in those space, we can't do one and not the other. So we do multi factor authentication. But we need to look at encryption for our devices. We need to build from the ground up. We need to have those recover capabilities. It's just kind of a never ending process. But I feel like one of the most important things that we've done over the last year, partly driven by the changes that we've had, is that we're finally recognizing that cyber security is a business issue. It's not a nightie issue. So if your digital and your assets are digital, how can you confine this to a nightie group? It's It's the business. It's risk. Let's understand what risk is acceptable cover the risk that isn't and treated like a business process that it ISS. >>That's great, because because I always often wonder, you know, if you think of it as an insurance problem, you know, then you're gonna be in trouble because you can't You can't just lock everything down, right? You gotta you gotta do business. And you always think of the, you know, ships or safest, uh, at harbor. But that's not what ships are built for, right? You can't just lock everything down, but if you take it more of a business approach, so you're you're measuring investments and risk and putting dollar amounts on it. Then you can start to figure out how much should I invest in security because you can't spend ah, 100% of your revenue on security. What is the happy medium? How do you decide and how do you apply that investment where, you know, it's kind of a portfolio strategy problem >>it is. And and that's one of the areas that again my five years in the building, the practice we've seen organizations start to move to. So you want to protect your most important assets the best. And then there are things that you still want to protect, but you can't afford the time, the budget, the operational expense of protecting everything. So let's understand what really drives this business if I'm a law firm might be my billion and document management systems and health care. It's a electronic medical record and manufacturing the manufacturing systems. So let's protect the most important things the best and then kind of moved down from there. We have to understand what those systems are before we can actually protect them. And that's where the business really needs to work more closely. And they are with the I T teams with cyber security teams, >>right, and like, I like a lot of big problems, right? You gotta break it down. You gotta You gotta prioritize. You gotta, you know, start just knocking off what's important and not so overwhelmed by, you know, trying to protect everything to the same degree. This is not practical, and it's not not a good investment. >>That's exactly the case. And there's the ongoing discussions about shortage of people in the cybersecurity space, which there are. But there are things that we can do that to really maximize what those people do, get them to focus on the higher level capabilities and let the tools do some of the things that the tools air good at. >>Right. So, you know, you triggered one last point and we'll wrap on this, but I'll give you the last word. Aziz, you look forward. Two things like automation and two things like artificial intelligence and machine learning that you can apply to make those professionals more effective on automate some stuff. Um, how do you see that evolving? And does that give you big smiles or frowns as you think about your use of AI in a nml versus the bad guys, they have some of the same tools as well. >>They dio and look, we have to use those to keep up. I'll give you example with with power, protect cyber recovery. We already use AI and ML to analyze the data that's in our vault. So how do you know that the data is good? We're not gonna have somebody in the vault looking through the files by leveraging those capabilities. We could give a verdict on that data. And so you know that it's good. I think we we have to continue to be careful that we understand what the tools are. We deploy them in the right way. You can't deploy tool just to deploy honor because it's hot or because it's interesting that goes back to understanding the systems that we need to protect the risks that we can accept or perhaps cover with insurance and the risks that gosh, we really can't accept. We need to make sure that the business continues to operate here, so I think it's great. Um, the communities have really come together. There's more information sharing than ever has gone on. And that's really one of our big weapons against the bad actors. >>All right, Well, Jim, thank you so much for sharing your insight. I think your job security is locked in for the foreseeable future. We didn't even get into five G and I o t and ever increasing attack, surface and sophistication of the bad guys. So thank you for doing what you do and helping keep us safe. Keep your data safe and keeping our companies running. >>Thank you for the opportunity. >>Alright, He's Jim. Mom. Jeff. Thanks for watching the cubes. Continuous coverage of Dell Technology World 2020. The Digital Experience. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman And we're digging in with the VMware cloud on AWS update, of course, an important solution set we've been talking about for a couple of years. If you see we've done interviews with some of the VMware and AWS executives, we did a deep dive on some of the technology. And now we get to dig in with one of the users of the technology. Of course, the executive talk about the proof of how many customers have been using it. So happy to welcome to the program I have two guests from PLM insurance. First, sitting right next to me on the screen is BJ Gardner, who's the lead system architect. Next to him is Dave Zeigenfuss, who is a senior systems architect. BJ and Dave, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us. All right. So BJ, just for our audience that does not know, Pennsylvania Lumberman's Mutual Insurance Company, give us a little bit about The company 125 years in history, obvious with the name, it's in the insurance business but help us understand, you know, what your business is and what you and Dave do for the organization. >> Sure, so Pennsylvania Lumbermens has been around for under 125 years, we just celebrated the 100 and 25th year. This February Actually, we are commercial insurance company, property Casualty. And we specialize in the wood niche. So we cover everything from lumber yards to auto fleets that have anything to do with moving wood selling wood. So we're pretty niche, we're pretty specific in our brand. And we're a mutual insurer. We're one of the few if not only one, left that does not offer insurance on mutual space >> Alright, and BJ give us a little bit of snapshot from an IT standpoint, obviously, you're using VMware, cause you're here, talk to us about what data centers and cloud usage looks like for PLM. >> So I've been without Pennsylvania Lumbermens for about 15 years, and we were operating in full on-prem with bare metal servers, and 2007-2008, We started with the VMware product set. And since then we've been moving little by little to the cloud. We have many of our core applications are sitting with vendors in the cloud as of right now, we have a small data center in Philadelphia that is an on prem. And then we have, which we'll talk about, why have cloud data center as a service model with the VMware Certified cloud partner called Faction. And then we also now have our disaster recovery as a cloud product. >> Excellent. Since we're talking about the the VMware cloud on AWS bring us inside a little bit,that DR In this case that you're using. That hybrid model, help tease that out. BJ will Start with you. And I'm sure, Dave will have some color to give after you share. >> Sure, I mean, you know, when you're talking about disaster recovery in general, the need to maintain business continuity, while keeping a lean IT staff and with no extended downtime and data loss is just... it's not an option. You can't afford to be down, you can't afford to lose data. So having a cloud service now for disaster recovery, or at least the concept of that helps us more IT shop, in the way of resources that we just don't have on hand on staff. So, that's, pretty much the biggest goal for us, is to maintain business continuity and you know, with our lean staff at the same time. >> Echoing BJ a bit, having an on prem solution and really, to BJ'S point about our lean staff, It made things quite cumbersome for us with maintaining backups replications and such. There was a lot involved. It was very time consuming. So the handoff to utilizing VMware cloud for our disaster purposes really, really helped that benefit our team as a whole. >> All right, you mentioned your partner on this solution is Faction. Help us understand how you made the decision to go down this path. >> So I can give you a quick... a quick rundown here how Faction came to be. so we're located our corporate is in fellow Philadelphia PA. We occupied two floors in an office building. Our data center was on the one floor we were consolidating. And we moved up to just one single floor. So we basically lost the footprint of the data center. So I went out hunting for co location type vendor, and hooked up with Faction. And yeah, so we've been with Faction for since 2015. We've had their, I call it kind of co lo, plus data centers as a service model, since then, since 2015. And we've been with them doing different initiatives here and there over the years and disaster recovery as a service is now one of them. >> Great, Dave, you've maybe supply a little more color on that piece. >> Yeah, sure. Yeah, the use of VMware cloud with Site Recovery Manager. Again, from a technical standpoint, it was second to none as far as the flexibility it gave us to grow our workloads, to maintain them. Recovery point objective was what really sold me. It allowed us to get extremely granular from a business continuity perspective. And, yeah, I'm a fan. I just, I really like VMware cloud with SRM. It's proven to be top notch. >> Yeah, maybe follow up on that, you've been a VMware customer for a number of years, you're familiar with the tooling, and everything else like that. So, how long did a solution like this take to roll out? >> So, I will guess so, absolutely, there was a good portion from when we started, so you have to kind of put it in perspective, because we had a data center in Atlanta, Georgia, that was our data recovery site with action. So we had a two fold project, we were going into a contract year, a renewal year. And Faction pitched, the AWS VMware on AWS service. So we were decommissioning a data center at the same time as we were rolling it out. So I'll just give you the quick timeline. So November of 2018, was basically the contract negotiations. We finalized everything kind of in February of 2019. As far as kicking off the call on how we are going to actually do the project. Work began around April of 2019. Faction went ahead and set up the AWS DDC environment in early May. Faction builds out the environment for the rest of May. June, we did some non disruptive load testing on the environment in AWS. We set up the replication recovery group build out throughout the summer of 2019. And then we had a full sign off in September 17th actually 2019 so I'll just kind of highlight though, in that process, that it took roughly about four months to do the full build out testing and the Atlanta data center decommissioning. >> Okay, and PJ after having done this, we've now got DR as a Service, what are the hero numbers? Have you reduced their cost savings loannes, How do you report up? The success or result of what you've done so far? >> Yeah, so speaking to that, so when we did the contract negotiation, in November of 2018, one of the things we realized when we were pitching the cloud disaster recovery as a service model, we saw roughly about a 20% annual savings in moving to this cloud service. So, a breakdown of what kind of the savings is it's pretty much in Atlanta we have some resource costs because we're running basically on a pillow type environment with with Baxter. and then we had a circuitry call, so we had a point to point line that would run out to, actually to New Jersey and then down to Atlanta. So we that cost as well. So we saved basically, we ripped out the point circuit And we got we offloaded some resource costs. So, like I said about a roughly about a 20% cost savings. >> Alright, so that that's some of the hard figures. Dave, bring us inside a little bit operationally, obviously, there's got to be a little bit of changes to how you manage things, automation is, has been hot for years, but even more so when you talk about cloud environments. So, how is this deployment, changed what the workers are doing and beyond that? >> Well, it's it's simplified things quite a bit, just by the partnership with Faction and in conjunction with VMware cloud for our disaster recovery solution, It's offered many benefits. For one, we had a primary engineer who left the company, we found some benefits to not having to fill that staff resource, so that that was also a positive from a money aspect. But as far as the day to day functioning where we go about doing things up, it really took things off my plate, off the rest of the teams plate And just really, really gave us a peace of mind as it pertains to our, our infrastructure and our data being secured. >> All right, well, I want to give you both the final word. What learnings do you have out of this? Any best practices you'd share? Or there's also some updates coming, taking VMware being able to take advantage of the latest bare metal offering from Amazon? I'll let you choose maybe BJ, we'll start with you and wrap with you Dave as to that those final words that you would share with your peers >> Yeah, I'll certainly start it off. I mean, coming from my perspective as kind of the manager of the team here, our goal as a company, our goal as an IT shop, our goal as an operations team, is to ensure the company's technology needs, will be met after, in the event of a disaster. And that is the key. You want to protect itself, you want to protect the data, you want to protect the customers. So, in the case of the cloud for us, is maintaining business continuity while reducing physical footprint and keeping the IT operations lean, like I had stated before. And one of the most important things and this is not just about disaster recovery, but establishing good partnerships with vendors, is absolutely imperative. Because I don't care how big your shop is, and again, we're on the small side, obviously, but you can't you can't do it alone. So you need really good strong partnerships and good relationships with them. >> And I would say, make sure you are Identify your critical business workloads. Know your environment, absolutely. It's imperative. Get it, you have to plan efficiently. And by all means, test, test test test, you can't test the solution enough. So that's really about all I have. >> All right, Well, David, BJ, thank you so much for joining us appreciate you sharing your your journey along and wish you the best of luck with the solution going forward. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> And thank you for joining us for this update VMware cloud on AWS, be sure to check out the cube.net for all the rest of the coverage we have both in the VMware and AWS ecosystems. I'm Stu Miniman And thank you as always for watching the cube. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's the queue with digital coverage of DockerCon live 2020. Brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome, welcome, welcome to DockerCon 2020. We got over 50,000 people registered so there's clearly a ton of interest in the world of Docker and Eddie's as I like to call it. And we've assembled a power panel of Open Source and cloud native experts to talk about where things stand in 2020 and where we're headed. I'm Shawn Conley, I'll be the moderator for today's panel. I'm also a proud alum of JBoss, Red Hat, SpringSource, VMware and Hortonworks and I'm broadcasting from my hometown of Philly. Our panelists include; Michelle Noorali, Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft, joining us from Atlanta, Georgia. We have Kelsey Hightower, Principal developer advocate at Google Cloud, joining us from Washington State and we have Chris Aniszczyk, CTO CIO at the CNCF, joining us from Austin, Texas. So I think we have the country pretty well covered. Thank you all for spending time with us on this power panel. Chris, I'm going to start with you, let's dive right in. You've been in the middle of the Docker netease wave since the beginning with a clear focus on building a better world through open collaboration. What are your thoughts on how the Open Source landscape has evolved over the past few years? Where are we in 2020? And where are we headed from both community and a tech perspective? Just curious to get things sized up? >> Sure, when CNCF started about roughly four, over four years ago, the technology mostly focused on just the things around Kubernetes, monitoring communities with technology like Prometheus, and I think in 2020 and the future, we definitely want to move up the stack. So there's a lot of tools being built on the periphery now. So there's a lot of tools that handle running different types of workloads on Kubernetes. So things like Uvert and Shay runs VMs on Kubernetes, which is crazy, not just containers. You have folks that, Microsoft experimenting with a project called Kruslet which is trying to run web assembly workloads natively on Kubernetes. So I think what we've seen now is more and more tools built around the periphery, while the core of Kubernetes has stabilized. So different technologies and spaces such as security and different ways to run different types of workloads. And at least that's kind of what I've seen. >> So do you have a fair amount of vendors as well as end users still submitting in projects in, is there still a pretty high volume? >> Yeah, we have 48 total projects in CNCF right now and Michelle could speak a little bit more to this being on the DOC, the pipeline for new projects is quite extensive and it covers all sorts of spaces from two service meshes to security projects and so on. So it's ever so expanding and filling in gaps in that cloud native landscape that we have. >> Awesome. Michelle, Let's head to you. But before we actually dive in, let's talk a little glory days. A rumor has it that you are the Fifth Grade Kickball Championship team captain. (Michelle laughs) Are the rumors true? >> They are, my speech at the end of the year was the first talk I ever gave. But yeah, it was really fun. I wasn't captain 'cause I wasn't really great at anything else apart from constantly cheer on the team. >> A little better than my eighth grade Spelling Champ Award so I think I'd rather have the kickball. But you've definitely, spent a lot of time leading an Open Source, you've been across many projects for many years. So how does the art and science of collaboration, inclusivity and teamwork vary? 'Cause you're involved in a variety of efforts, both in the CNCF and even outside of that. And then what are some tips for expanding the tent of Open Source projects? >> That's a good question. I think it's about transparency. Just come in and tell people what you really need to do and clearly articulate your problem, more clearly articulate your problem and why you can't solve it with any other solution, the more people are going to understand what you're trying to do and be able to collaborate with you better. What I love about Open Source is that where I've seen it succeed is where incentives of different perspectives and parties align and you're just transparent about what you want. So you can collaborate where it makes sense, even if you compete as a company with another company in the same area. So I really like that, but I just feel like transparency and honesty is what it comes down to and clearly communicating those objectives. >> Yeah, and the various foundations, I think one of the things that I've seen, particularly Apache Software Foundation and others is the notion of checking your badge at the door. Because the competition might be between companies, but in many respects, you have engineers across many companies that are just kicking butt with the tech they contribute, claiming victory in one way or the other might make for interesting marketing drama. But, I think that's a little bit of the challenge. In some of the, standards-based work you're doing I know with CNI and some other things, are they similar, are they different? How would you compare and contrast into something a little more structured like CNCF? >> Yeah, so most of what I do is in the CNCF, but there's specs and there's projects. I think what CNCF does a great job at is just iterating to make it an easier place for developers to collaborate. You can ask the CNCF for basically whatever you need, and they'll try their best to figure out how to make it happen. And we just continue to work on making the processes are clearer and more transparent. And I think in terms of specs and projects, those are such different collaboration environments. Because if you're in a project, you have to say, "Okay, I want this feature or I want this bug fixed." But when you're in a spec environment, you have to think a little outside of the box and like, what framework do you want to work in? You have to think a little farther ahead in terms of is this solution or this decision we're going to make going to last for the next how many years? You have to get more of a buy in from all of the key stakeholders and maintainers. So it's a little bit of a longer process, I think. But what's so beautiful is that you have this really solid, standard or interface that opens up an ecosystem and allows people to build things that you could never have even imagined or dreamed of so-- >> Gotcha. So I'm Kelsey, we'll head over to you as your focus is on, developer advocate, you've been in the cloud native front lines for many years. Today developers are faced with a ton of moving parts, spanning containers, functions, Cloud Service primitives, including container services, server-less platforms, lots more, right? I mean, there's just a ton of choice. How do you help developers maintain a minimalist mantra in the face of such a wealth of choice? I think minimalism I hear you talk about that periodically, I know you're a fan of that. How do you pass that on and your developer advocacy in your day to day work? >> Yeah, I think, for most developers, most of this is not really the top of mind for them, is something you may see a post on Hacker News, and you might double click into it. Maybe someone on your team brought one of these tools in and maybe it leaks up into your workflow so you're forced to think about it. But for most developers, they just really want to continue writing code like they've been doing. And the best of these projects they'll never see. They just work, they get out of the way, they help them with log in, they help them run their application. But for most people, this isn't the core idea of the job for them. For people in operations, on the other hand, maybe these components fill a gap. So they look at a lot of this stuff that you see in the CNCF and Open Source space as number one, various companies or teams sharing the way that they do things, right? So these are ideas that are put into the Open Source, some of them will turn into products, some of them will just stay as projects that had mutual benefit for multiple people. But for the most part, it's like walking through an ion like Home Depot. You pick the tools that you need, you can safely ignore the ones you don't need, and maybe something looks interesting and maybe you study it to see if that if you have a problem. And for most people, if you don't have that problem that that tool solves, you should be happy. No one needs every project and I think that's where the foundation for confusion. So my main job is to help people not get stuck and confused in LAN and just be pragmatic and just use the tools that work for 'em. >> Yeah, and you've spent the last little while in the server-less space really diving into that area, compare and contrast, I guess, what you found there, minimalist approach, who are you speaking to from a server-less perspective versus that of the broader CNCF? >> The thing that really pushed me over, I was teaching my daughter how to make a website. So she's on her Chromebook, making a website, and she's hitting 127.0.0.1, and it looks like geo cities from the 90s but look, she's making website. And she wanted her friends to take a look. So she copied and paste from her browser 127.0.0.1 and none of her friends could pull it up. So this is the point where every parent has to cross that line and say, "Hey, do I really need to sit down "and teach my daughter about Linux "and Docker and Kubernetes." That isn't her main goal, her goal was to just launch her website in a way that someone else can see it. So we got Firebase installed on her laptop, she ran one command, Firebase deploy. And our site was up in a few minutes, and she sent it over to her friend and there you go, she was off and running. The whole server-less movement has that philosophy as one of the stated goal that needs to be the workflow. So, I think server-less is starting to get closer and closer, you start to see us talk about and Chris mentioned this earlier, we're moving up the stack. Where we're going to up the stack, the North Star there is feel where you get the focus on what you're doing, and not necessarily how to do it underneath. And I think server-less is not quite there yet but every type of workload, stateless web apps check, event driven workflows check, but not necessarily for things like machine learning and some other workloads that more traditional enterprises want to run so there's still work to do there. So server-less for me, serves as the North Star for why all these Projects exists for people that may have to roll their own platform, to provide the experience. >> So, Chris, on a related note, with what we were just talking about with Kelsey, what's your perspective on the explosion of the cloud native landscape? There's, a ton of individual projects, each can be used separately, but in many cases, they're like Lego blocks and used together. So things like the surface mesh interface, standardizing interfaces, so things can snap together more easily, I think, are some of the approaches but are you doing anything specifically to encourage this cross fertilization and collaboration of bug ability, because there's just a ton of projects, not only at the CNCF but outside the CNCF that need to plug in? >> Yeah, I mean, a lot of this happens organically. CNCF really provides of the neutral home where companies, competitors, could trust each other to build interesting technology. We don't force integration or collaboration, it happens on its own. We essentially allow the market to decide what a successful project is long term or what an integration is. We have a great Technical Oversight Committee that helps shepherd the overall technical vision for the organization and sometimes steps in and tries to do the right thing when it comes to potentially integrating a project. Previously, we had this issue where there was a project called Open Tracing, and an effort called Open Census, which is basically trying to standardize how you're going to deal with metrics, on the tree and so on in a cloud native world that we're essentially competing with each other. The CNCF TC and committee came together and merged those projects into one parent ever called Open Elementary and so that to me is a case study of how our committee helps, bridges things. But we don't force things, we essentially want our community of end users and vendors to decide which technology is best in the long term, and we'll support that. >> Okay, awesome. And, Michelle, you've been focused on making distributed systems digestible, which to me is about simplifying things. And so back when Docker arrived on the scene, some people referred to it as developer dopamine, which I love that term, because it's simplified a bunch of crufty stuff for developers and actually helped them focus on doing their job, writing code, delivering code, what's happening in the community to help developers wire together multi-part modern apps in a way that's elegant, digestible, feels like a dopamine rush? >> Yeah, one of the goals of the(mumbles) project was to make it easier to deploy an application on Kubernetes so that you could see what the finished product looks like. And then dig into all of the things that that application is composed of, all the resources. So we're really passionate about this kind of stuff for a while now. And I love seeing projects that come into the space that have this same goal and just iterate and make things easier. I think we have a ways to go still, I think a lot of the iOS developers and JS developers I get to talk to don't really care that much about Kubernetes. They just want to, like Kelsey said, just focus on their code. So one of the projects that I really like working with is Tilt gives you this dashboard in your CLI, aggregates all your logs from your applications, And it kind of watches your application changes, and reconfigures those changes in Kubernetes so you can see what's going on, it'll catch errors, anything with a dashboard I love these days. So Yali is like a metrics dashboard that's integrated with STL, a service graph of your service mesh, and lets you see the metrics running there. I love that, I love that dashboard so much. Linkerd has some really good service graph images, too. So anything that helps me as an end user, which I'm not technically an end user, but me as a person who's just trying to get stuff up and running and working, see the state of the world easily and digest them has been really exciting to see. And I'm seeing more and more dashboards come to light and I'm very excited about that. >> Yeah, as part of the DockerCon just as a person who will be attending some of the sessions, I'm really looking forward to see where DockerCompose is going, I know they opened up the spec to broader input. I think your point, the good one, is there's a bit more work to really embrace the wealth of application artifacts that compose a larger application. So there's definitely work the broader community needs to lean in on, I think. >> I'm glad you brought that up, actually. Compose is something that I should have mentioned and I'm glad you bring that up. I want to see programming language libraries, integrate with the Compose spec. I really want to see what happens with that I think is great that they open that up and made that a spec because obviously people really like using Compose. >> Excellent. So Kelsey, I'd be remiss if I didn't touch on your January post on changelog entitled, "Monoliths are the Future." Your post actually really resonated with me. My son works for a software company in Austin, Texas. So your hometown there, Chris. >> Yeah. >> Shout out to Will and the chorus team. His development work focuses on adding modern features via micro services as extensions to the core monolith that the company was founded on. So just share some thoughts on monoliths, micro services. And also, what's deliverance dopamine from your perspective more broadly, but people usually phrase as monoliths versus micro services, but I get the sense you don't believe it's either or. >> Yeah, I think most companies from the pragmatic so one of their argument is one of pragmatism. Most companies have trouble designing any app, monolith, deployable or microservices architecture. And then these things evolve over time. Unless you're really careful, it's really hard to know how to slice these things. So taking an idea or a problem and just knowing how to perfectly compartmentalize it into individual deployable component, that's hard for even the best people to do. And double down knowing the actual solution to the particular problem. A lot of problems people are solving they're solving for the first time. It's really interesting, our industry in general, a lot of people who work in it have never solved the particular problem that they're trying to solve for the first time. So that's interesting. The other part there is that most of these tools that are here to help are really only at the infrastructure layer. We're talking freeways and bridges and toll bridges, but there's nothing that happens in the actual developer space right there in memory. So the libraries that interface to the structure logging, the libraries that deal with rate limiting, the libraries that deal with authorization, can this person make this query with this user ID? A lot of those things are still left for developers to figure out on their own. So while we have things like the brunettes and fluid D, we have all of these tools to deploy apps into those target, most developers still have the problem of everything you do above that line. And to be honest, the majority of the complexity has to be resolved right there in the app. That's the thing that's taking requests directly from the user. And this is where maybe as an industry, we're over-correcting. So we had, you said you come from the JBoss world, I started a lot of my Cisco administration, there's where we focus a little bit more on the actual application needs, maybe from a router that as well. But now what we're seeing is things like Spring Boot, start to offer a little bit more integration points in the application space itself. So I think the biggest parts that are missing now are what are the frameworks people will use for authorization? So you have projects like OPA, Open Policy Agent for those that are new to that, it gives you this very low level framework, but you still have to understand the concepts around, what does it mean to allow someone to do something and one missed configuration, all your security goes out of the window. So I think for most developers this is where the next set of challenges lie, if not actually the original challenge. So for some people, they were able to solve most of these problems with virtualization, run some scripts, virtualize everything and be fine. And monoliths were okay for that. For some reason, we've thrown pragmatism out of the window and some people are saying the only way to solve these problems is by breaking the app into 1000 pieces. Forget the fact that you had trouble managing one piece, you're going to somehow find the ability to manage 1000 pieces with these tools underneath but still not solving the actual developer problems. So this is where you've seen it already with a couple of popular blog posts from other companies. They cut too deep. They're going from 2000, 3000 microservices back to maybe 100 or 200. So to my world, it's going to be not just one monolith, but end up maybe having 10 or 20 monoliths that maybe reflect the organization that you have versus the architectural pattern that you're at. >> I view it as like a constellation of stars and planets, et cetera. Where you you might have a star that has a variety of, which is a monolith, and you have a variety of sort of planetary microservices that float around it. But that's reality, that's the reality of modern applications, particularly if you're not starting from a clean slate. I mean your points, a good one is, in many respects, I think the infrastructure is code movement has helped automate a bit of the deployment of the platform. I've been personally focused on app development JBoss as well as springsSource. The Spring team I know that tech pretty well over the years 'cause I was involved with that. So I find that James Governor's discussion of progressive delivery really resonates with me, as a developer, not so much as an infrastructure Deployer. So continuous delivery is more of infrastructure notice notion, progressive delivery, feature flags, those types of things, or app level, concepts, minimizing the blast radius of your, the new features you're deploying, that type of stuff, I think begins to speak to the pain of application delivery. So I'll guess I'll put this up. Michelle, I might aim it to you, and then we'll go around the horn, what are your thoughts on the progressive delivery area? How could that potentially begin to impact cloud native over 2020? I'm looking for some rallying cries that move up the stack and give a set of best practices, if you will. And I think James Governor of RedMonk opened on something that's pretty important. >> Yeah, I think it's all about automating all that stuff that you don't really know about. Like Flagger is an awesome progressive delivery tool, you can just deploy something, and people have been asking for so many years, ever since I've been in this space, it's like, "How do I do AB deployment?" "How do I do Canary?" "How do I execute these different deployment strategies?" And Flagger is a really good example, for example, it's a really good way to execute these deployment strategies but then, make sure that everything's happening correctly via observing metrics, rollback if you need to, so you don't just throw your whole system. I think it solves the problem and allows you to take risks but also keeps you safe in that you can be confident as you roll out your changes that it all works, it's metrics driven. So I'm just really looking forward to seeing more tools like that. And dashboards, enable that kind of functionality. >> Chris, what are your thoughts in that progressive delivery area? >> I mean, CNCF alone has a lot of projects in that space, things like Argo that are tackling it. But I want to go back a little bit to your point around developer dopamine, as someone that probably spent about a decade of his career focused on developer tooling and in fact, if you remember the Eclipse IDE and that whole integrated experience, I was blown away recently by a demo from GitHub. They have something called code spaces, which a long time ago, I was trying to build development environments that essentially if you were an engineer that joined a team recently, you could basically get an environment quickly start it with everything configured, source code checked out, environment properly set up. And that was a very hard problem. This was like before container days and so on and to see something like code spaces where you'd go to a repo or project, open it up, behind the scenes they have a container that is set up for the environment that you need to build and just have a VS code ID integrated experience, to me is completely magical. It hits like developer dopamine immediately for me, 'cause a lot of problems when you're going to work with a project attribute, that whole initial bootstrap of, "Oh you need to make sure you have this library, this install," it's so incredibly painful on top of just setting up your developer environment. So as we continue to move up the stack, I think you're going to see an incredible amount of improvements around the developer tooling and developer experience that people have powered by a lot of this cloud native technology behind the scenes that people may not know about. >> Yeah, 'cause I've been talking with the team over at Docker, the work they're doing with that desktop, enable the aim local environment, make sure it matches as closely as possible as your deployed environments that you might be targeting. These are some of the pains, that I see. It's hard for developers to get bootstrapped up, it might take him a day or two to actually just set up their local laptop and development environment, and particularly if they change teams. So that complexity really corralling that down and not necessarily being overly prescriptive as to what tool you use. So if you're visual code, great, it should feel integrated into that environment, use a different environment or if you feel more comfortable at the command line, you should be able to opt into that. That's some of the stuff I get excited to potentially see over 2020 as things progress up the stack, as you said. So, Michelle, just from an innovation train perspective, and we've covered a little bit, what's the best way for people to get started? I think Kelsey covered a little bit of that, being very pragmatic, but all this innovation is pretty intimidating, you can get mowed over by the train, so to speak. So what's your advice for how people get started, how they get involved, et cetera. >> Yeah, it really depends on what you're looking for and what you want to learn. So, if you're someone who's new to the space, honestly, check out the case studies on cncf.io, those are incredible. You might find environments that are similar to your organization's environments, and read about what worked for them, how they set things up, any hiccups they crossed. It'll give you a broad overview of the challenges that people are trying to solve with the technology in this space. And you can use that drill into the areas that you want to learn more about, just depending on where you're coming from. I find myself watching old KubeCon talks on the cloud native computing foundations YouTube channel, so they have like playlists for all of the conferences and the special interest groups in CNCF. And I really enjoy talking, I really enjoy watching excuse me, older talks, just because they explain why things were done, the way they were done, and that helps me build the tools I built. And if you're looking to get involved, if you're building projects or tools or specs and want to contribute, we have special interest groups in the CNCF. So you can find that in the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee, TOC GitHub repo. And so for that, if you want to get involved there, choose a vertical. Do you want to learn about observability? Do you want to drill into networking? Do you care about how to deliver your app? So we have a cig called app delivery, there's a cig for each major vertical, and you can go there to see what is happening on the edge. Really, these are conversations about, okay, what's working, what's not working and what are the next changes we want to see in the next months. So if you want that kind of granularity and discussion on what's happening like that, then definitely join those those meetings. Check out those meeting notes and recordings. >> Gotcha. So on Kelsey, as you look at 2020 and beyond, I know, you've been really involved in some of the earlier emerging tech spaces, what gets you excited when you look forward? What gets your own level of dopamine up versus the broader community? What do you see coming that we should start thinking about now? >> I don't think any of the raw technology pieces get me super excited anymore. Like, I've seen the circle of around three or four times, in five years, there's going to be a new thing, there might be a new foundation, there'll be a new set of conferences, and we'll all rally up and probably do this again. So what's interesting now is what people are actually using the technology for. Some people are launching new things that maybe weren't possible because infrastructure costs were too high. People able to jump into new business segments. You start to see these channels on YouTube where everyone can buy a mic and a B app and have their own podcasts and be broadcast to the globe, just for a few bucks, if not for free. Those revolutionary things are the big deal and they're hard to come by. So I think we've done a good job democratizing these ideas, distributed systems, one company got really good at packaging applications to share with each other, I think that's great, and never going to reset again. And now what's going to be interesting is, what will people build with this stuff? If we end up building the same things we were building before, and then we're talking about another digital transformation 10 years from now because it's going to be funny but Kubernetes will be the new legacy. It's going to be the things that, "Oh, man, I got stuck in this Kubernetes thing," and there'll be some governor on TV, looking for old school Kubernetes engineers to migrate them to some new thing, that's going to happen. You got to know that. So at some point merry go round will stop. And we're going to be focused on what you do with this. So the internet is there, most people have no idea of the complexities of underwater sea cables. It's beyond one or two people, or even one or two companies to comprehend. You're at the point now, where most people that jump on the internet are talking about what you do with the internet. You can have Netflix, you can do meetings like this one, it's about what you do with it. So that's going to be interesting. And we're just not there yet with tech, tech is so, infrastructure stuff. We're so in the weeds, that most people almost burn out what's just getting to the point where you can start to look at what you do with this stuff. So that's what I keep in my eye on, is when do we get to the point when people just ship things and build things? And I think the closest I've seen so far is in the mobile space. If you're iOS developer, Android developer, you use the SDK that they gave you, every year there's some new device that enables some new things speech to text, VR, AR and you import an STK, and it just worked. And you can put it in one place and 100 million people can download it at the same time with no DevOps team, that's amazing. When can we do that for server side applications? That's going to be something I'm going to find really innovative. >> Excellent. Yeah, I mean, I could definitely relate. I was Hortonworks in 2011, so, Hadoop, in many respects, was sort of the precursor to the Kubernetes area, in that it was, as I like to refer to, it was a bunch of animals in the zoo, wasn't just the yellow elephant. And when things mature beyond it's basically talking about what kind of analytics are driving, what type of machine learning algorithms and applications are they delivering? You know that's when things tip over into a real solution space. So I definitely see that. I think the other cool thing even just outside of the container and container space, is there's just such a wealth of data related services. And I think how those two worlds come together, you brought up the fact that, in many respects, server-less is great, it's stateless, but there's just a ton of stateful patterns out there that I think also need to be addressed as these richer applications to be from a data processing and actionable insights perspective. >> I also want to be clear on one thing. So some people confuse two things here, what Michelle said earlier about, for the first time, a whole group of people get to learn about distributed systems and things that were reserved to white papers, PhDs, CF site, this stuff is now super accessible. You go to the CNCF site, all the things that you read about or we used to read about, you can actually download, see how it's implemented and actually change how it work. That is something we should never say is a waste of time. Learning is always good because someone has to build these type of systems and whether they sell it under the guise of server-less or not, this will always be important. Now the other side of this is, that there are people who are not looking to learn that stuff, the majority of the world isn't looking. And in parallel, we should also make this accessible, which should enable people that don't need to learn all of that before they can be productive. So that's two sides of the argument that can be true at the same time, a lot of people get caught up. And everything should just be server-less and everyone learning about distributed systems, and contributing and collaborating is wasting time. We can't have a world where there's only one or two companies providing all infrastructure for everyone else, and then it's a black box. We don't need that. So we need to do both of these things in parallel so I just want to make sure I'm clear that it's not one of these or the other. >> Yeah, makes sense, makes sense. So we'll just hit the final topic. Chris, I think I'll ask you to help close this out. COVID-19 clearly has changed how people work and collaborate. I figured we'd end on how do you see, so DockerCon is going to virtual events, inherently the Open Source community is distributed and is used to not face to face collaboration. But there's a lot of value that comes together by assembling a tent where people can meet, what's the best way? How do you see things playing out? What's the best way for this to evolve in the face of the new normal? >> I think in the short term, you're definitely going to see a lot of virtual events cropping up all over the place. Different themes, verticals, I've already attended a handful of virtual events the last few weeks from Red Hat summit to Open Compute summit to Cloud Native summit, you'll see more and more of these. I think, in the long term, once the world either get past COVID or there's a vaccine or something, I think the innate nature for people to want to get together and meet face to face and deal with all the serendipitous activities you would see in a conference will come back, but I think virtual events will augment these things in the short term. One benefit we've seen, like you mentioned before, DockerCon, can have 50,000 people at it. I don't remember what the last physical DockerCon had but that's definitely an order of magnitude more. So being able to do these virtual events to augment potential of physical events in the future so you can build a more inclusive community so people who cannot travel to your event or weren't lucky enough to win a scholarship could still somehow interact during the course of event to me is awesome and I hope something that we take away when we start all doing these virtual events when we get back to physical events, we find a way to ensure that these things are inclusive for everyone and not just folks that can physically make it there. So those are my thoughts on on the topic. And I wish you the best of luck planning of DockerCon and so on. So I'm excited to see how it turns out. 50,000 is a lot of people and that just terrifies me from a cloud native coupon point of view, because we'll probably be somewhere. >> Yeah, get ready. Excellent, all right. So that is a wrap on the DockerCon 2020 Open Source Power Panel. I think we covered a ton of ground. I'd like to thank Chris, Kelsey and Michelle, for sharing their perspectives on this continuing wave of Docker and cloud native innovation. I'd like to thank the DockerCon attendees for tuning in. And I hope everybody enjoys the rest of the conference. (upbeat music)

>>Live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the cube covering Ansible Fest 2019 brought to you by red hat. >>Welcome back. This is the cubes coverage of Ansible Fest 2019. I'm Stu Miniman. My cohost of the week is John farrier. And this is the cube insights where we share our independent analysis, break down what we're hearing from the community, what we've learned from all of our interviews. John, uh, you know, we knew community would be a big portion of what we did here. Uh, culture and collaboration were things that we talked a lot about that wasn't necessarily what I thought I would be hearing. Uh, you've been talking a lot about how observability and automation are the, the huge wave. We've seen, you know, acquisitions, we've seen IPOs, we've seen investments. So, you know, your, your, your take here as we're wrapping up. Sure, sure. Last to, um, as we said in our opening in the big scene here has been automation for all that's Ansible's kind of rap because they're, you know, they're announcing their main news ants, full automation platform. >>So that's the big news. But the bottom line is where this emerged from was configuration management and supple started out as a small little project that's solved a very specific problem. It solved configuring devices and all the automation around, you know, opening up ports and things that that were important beyond the basic static routing, the old web one. Dot. O web 2.0 model. And it grew into a software abstraction layer for automating because a lot of that stuff, the mundane tasks in configuring networks and servers frankly were boring and redundant. Everyone hated them patches. So easy ground to automate. And I think, um, it's evolved a lot into dev ops because with the cloud scale more devices, just because software's defining everything, it doesn't mean servers go away. So we know that is more servers is more storage, it's in the cloud, it's on premise, it's cloud operations. >>So automation I think, and I'm, my prediction is is that automation will be as big of a category as observability was. And remember we kinda missed observability we saw it as important. We've covered all those companies, but especially in network management on steroids with the cloud. But look what happened. Multiple companies when public big companies getting sold for billions of dollars, a lot of M and a activity observability is the most, one of the most important areas of cloud 2.0 it's not just some white space around network management. The data is super important. I think automation is going to grow into a highly competitive, highly relevant in the lucrative marketplace for companies and I think Ansible is in pole position to capture that with red hat and now red hat part of IBM. I think automation is going to be very big land grab. It's going to be where the value is created. >>I think observability and automation are going to go hand in hand and I think AI and data, those are the things programming infrastructure revolve around those two spheres. I think it is going to be super important. I think that's why the cube is here. We smelled it out, we sniffing it and we can see. We can touch it and the community here, they're doing it. They're there actually have proof points. Yup. These, this community is demonstrating that the process is going to be more efficient. The technology works and the people are transforming and that is a key piece with automation. People can work on other things and it's certainly changing the game. So all three aspects of digital transformation are in lockstep and, and, and, and expanding rapidly. >>Yeah. John, I would expect nothing less than a bold prediction from you on this space. You know, it's only $150 million acquisition, which is really small compared to a lot of the acquisitions that we see these as heck. You know, red hat Ansible didn't get talked about all that much when you know, IBM went and spent over $30 billion for red hat. But absolutely automation is so important that infrastructure is code movement that we've been tracking for quite a long time helps enable automation across the entire stack. A lot of discussion this week here, networking and security, two areas that we know need to make progress and we need to have, you know, less errors. We need to be able to make changes faster and cloud. We just as in the infrastructure space, that configuration management, we need to be able to simplify things. Absolutely. One of the things that will slow down the growth of cloud is that if we can't simplify those environments, so the same type of tooling and where Ansible is trying to, you know, span between the traditional environments and the cloud is to get this working in the containerization cloud native Kubernetes world that we're living in. >>Yeah, and it's still, you're right on, I mean this is the analysis and that it's spot on. I think one of the nuances in the industry landscape is a, when red hat got acquired by IBM for a massive amount of money, everyone's scratching their heads. But if you think about what red hat has done and you know I'm a real big fan of red hat, you are too. They're smart. They make great acquisitions, Ansible, not a big payout. They had coral West, they, they got open shifts there. They're the decouple their operating systems people. They get the notion of systems architecture. I think red hat is executed brilliantly in that systems mindset, which is perfect for cloud computing. I think Arvin Krishna at IBM really understood the impact of red hat and when I talked to him at red hat summit two years ago, right before the acquisition, he had the twinkle in his eye when I asked him about red at, because you can see them connecting the dots. Red hat brings a lot to the table and if IBM doesn't screw up red hat, then they're going to do well and we talk about red hat not screwing up Ansible and they didn't. Now part of it, if IBM doesn't screw up the red hat acquisition, let red hat bring that systems mindset in. I think IBM could use red has a beautiful way to bring a systems architecture into cloud, cloud native and really take a lot of territory down these new cloud native apps. >>John F automation is a force multiplier for customers and Ansible has that capability to be a force multiplier for red hat. When you look at the ecosystem they're building out here, the Ansible automation platform really helps it get customers more in lock steps. So you know, I was talking to the people and said, Oh, you know, AWS has an update. Oh we need to roll the entire core and put out another version. I can't wait for that. I need to be able to decouple the partner activity, which by the way, they talked about how the disk project is the six most popular in get hub decoupling collections might actually put them lower on the on the list, but that's okay because they're solving real customer problems. And it's interesting, John, we talk about the ecosystem here. One of, there's only a couple of other companies other than red hat that can commit without having to go through approval. Microsoft is one of them. So you talk about the, the collaboration, the ecosystem here where this can be, >>let's do the, the thing about Ansible is that it's a double edged sword. There value is also an Achilles heel. And one of the critical analysis that I have is, is that they're not broad enough yet. On and there and there. I won't say misunderstood the customers here in the community, they totally get it. Everyone here loves Ansible. The problem is is that in the global landscape of the industry, they're tiny red hat needs to bring this out faster. I think IBM has to get animal out there faster because they have all the elements kind of popping right now. You got community, very strong customer base, loyal and dynamic. You got champions developing. That's classic sign of success. They got a great product, perfectly fit for this glue layer, this integration layer, you know, below containers and maybe you can even sitting above containers depending on how you look at it. And then finally the ecosystem of partners. Not yet fully robust, but all the names are here. Microsoft, Cisco net app F five kind of feels like VMworld on a small scale. They have to up level it. I think that's the critical problem I see with with these guys is that it's almost too good and too small. >>Yeah. Uh, you know, when I look back at when red hat made the acquisition, there were a handful of companies, most of them embracing open source as to which configuration management tool you're going to do. Ansible did well against them and red hat helped make them the category leader in this space. There is a different competitive landscape today. Just public cloud. You know, Ansible can help, but there's some customers that would be like, Oh, I've got different tooling and it doesn't fit into what I'm doing today. So there's some different competitors in the landscape and we know John, every customer we've talked to, they've got a lot of tools. So how does Ansible get mind share inside the company? They had some great stories that we heard both on the Q from like ING and the Southern company as well as in the keynotes from JP Morgan where they're scaling out, they're building playbooks, they're doing this, but you know, this is not, you know, it's not just push a button to get all of this rolled out. >>The IBM marketing should help here. And if I'm, you know, um, uh, the marketing team at IBM, I'd be like all over this because this is a, a game changer because this could be a digital transformation ingredient. The people equation. The problem is, is that again, IBM to embrace this and Ansible has that glue layer integration. This could be great. Now the benefit to them, I think they're tailwind is they can solve a lot of problems. One nuance from the show that I learned was, okay, configuration management, dev ops, great. The network automation is looking good. Security is a huge opportunity because if you think about the basic blocking and tackling patches, configuration, misconfigurations, automation plays perfect role. So to get beachhead in the enterprise as an extraction layer is to own and dominate those basics. Because think about the big hacks. Capitol one, misconfigured firewall to an S three bucket, that wasn't Amazon's fault, but the data on Amazon, this is automation can solve a lot of these problems, patches, malware, vulnerabilities, the adversaries are going to be all over that. >>So I think the security piece, huge upside position, Ansible and red hat as an abstraction layer to solve those basic problems rather than overselling it could be a great strategy. I think they're doing a good job with that. Uh, it totally, you know, built on simplicity and modularity. Uh, this, this tooling is something that it can sit lots of places in the organization, uh, and help that cultural communication. Uh, I was a bit critical of, uh, you know, enterprise collaboration, uh, that, that top down push that you'd get. Um, but here, you know, you've got a tool that uh, as we, we just had on our final interview with, uh, Pirog, you know, developers, they didn't build this for developers, but developers are embracing it. The infrastructure people are embracing it. It gives a sense of some why we here to why we're here is I think Ansible fast as a community event, which we love. >>But two, I think this is early, you know, days in the Canadian, the coal mine and saying that the Ansible formula for automation is going to be a growth year. That's my prediction. And we have data to back it up. If you look at our our community and the folks out in the cube alumni know no that when we reach out to them and get some data. But here's what supports why I think the automation thing with Ansible and red hat is relevant because it applies what we just talked about. The number one thing that came back from the community stew was focused efforts on better results. Automation from time efficiency days, hours to minutes check. Security is absolutely a top driver for automation. That's a tailwind. The job satisfaction issue is not like a marketing feel. Good thing. People actually liked their jobs when they have to, don't have to come in on the weekends. >>So this automation does align with that. And finally infrastructure and developers re-skilling with new capabilities and new things. Is it just an uplift? So those are the drivers driving the automation. That's why RPA is so hot and this is a critical foundation in my opinion. So you know Ansible's is the leading the wave here in this new automation wave and I think it's going to be a big part because it's controlling the plumbing. Yeah, John wanted the machinery. Johnny is the, the, the future of work. We know that automation is going to be hugely important. You mentioned >>RPA, a huge one. I had an interview with the associate professor from Syracuse university or they're teaching this to education. It's not just, Oh Hey you got to go learn coding and learn this programming language. No, we need to have that. That combination of the business understanding and the technology and automation can sit right at that intersection. What's your big learning point? What did you take away? Yeah, so it is, it's that point here that this is not just to some, you know, cool little tool on the side. This is something you John, we've talked at many shows. Software can actually be a unifying factor inside companies to help build platforms and for customers to help them collaborate and work together. This a tool like Ansible isn't just something that is done tactically but strategically, you know, gets everyone on the same page enables that collaboration isn't just another channel of you know, some other thing that a, I don't want to have to deal with it. >>It helps me get my job better. Increases that job satisfaction. That's so hugely important as to if you think about the digital transformation form of the people, process technology, how many interviews have we done, how many interviews have we done, a companies we've talked to where they have the great product and on the process side to address the process. They have the tech but they fail on the people side. It's the cultural adoption, it's the, it's the real enablement and I think Ansible's challenge is to take the platform, the capabilities of their, of their, of their software, launch the platform and create value because if they're not enabling value out of the platform that does not cross check with what platforms are supposed to do, which is create value. And John, the thing I want to look for when we come back to this show next year is how much are they allowing customers delivered through data? >>When we heard from their engineering division here, okay, the platforms, the first piece, but how do I measure internally and how do I measure against our peers? We know that that people want to have, there's so much information out there. How am I doing? Am I, where am I on my the five, five step progression and adoption of automation and you know, Hey, am I doing good against my competition or are they smoking me? Well? That's the metrics with the insight piece and tying it to the rail. Now people can say, look, I just saved a bunch of money. I saved some time. That's the business impact and I think you know when you have the KPIs and you had the analysts to back it up, good things will happen. Students been great. All right, John, always a pleasure to catch up with you. We got lot more here toward the second half of 2019 a big thanks to the whole community for of course watching this here at antelopes Fest. Check out the cube.net for all the upcoming shows. Thank you to our whole production team and to our hosts. Red hat for giving this beautiful set right in the middle of the show. And thanks as always for watching the cube.

>>live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the Q covering Answerable Fest 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >>Welcome back. This is the Cubes Live coverage of anti professed 2019 here in Atlanta. Georgia Instrument in my co host is John Ferrier and happy to welcome to the program the first time guest pile sing. Who's a principal solutions engineer with F five? Of course. Five's a partner of Anti Bowl In the keynote this morning when they were laying out You know how to use all of these pieces? Oh, I need a load balancer. Great. Here. Here's five to the rescue. So tell us a little bit about you know your role inside F five and kind of fights activities here at the show. >>Sure. Sure. Uh, so thank you for the introduction. Yeah, My name is our piloting principal solution. Ngo S O. I work a lot with different alliance partners and answerable being one of them. Of course, s O. I develop technical integrated joint solutions with answerable. You know, we've had a great, great working relationship with the answerable. They've been absolutely wonderful to work with on at this summit. We have various activities We had a workshop at the contributor summit. We had a session yesterday. We have another workshop on Thursday. So we're really busy, you know, the boots being flowing. And so far, it's been an awesome experience. >>The other people of the show here, they really dig into what they're doing. Ah, you know, even on the bus ride to the party last night, people are talking about their configurations at lunchtime. Everybody is talking about it. Bring us inside a little bit, you know? So is the new collections what people are asking you about? Are there other deployment ways? You know, what are some of the things that are bringing people to talk to >>people That kind of talking, you know, on a broad spectrum, you know, there's some people are just starting out with answerable. They just want to know, you know, how do I write a play book with their 500? Get it running? Others are a little more advanced, you know, Let's get into rules, you know? What are we doing with rules? And then now collections is coming on top of mine. You know how you guys doing with collections, So of course we are in lockstep. You know, we have the first collections out. We're gonna bundle playbooks and a lot of work flows and rules that gonna be someone. It's gonna be easy for customers to just download used these work clothes out of the box and get started with that five. But we've had, you know, different use cases, different questions around Day zero deployment was his data management. Bliss is monitoring was back of resource. All sorts of questions >>in one of the things that's come up is, you know, hit the low hanging fruit and then go to the ant, worked close in tow and is more of a kind of the bigger opportunities. But, you know, we've been talking about Dev Ops two for 10 years, and this to me has always been like the area that's been ripe for Dev ops, configuration management, a lot of the plumbing. But now that it's 10 years later starting to see this glue layer, this integration layer come out and the ecosystem of partners is growing very rapidly for answerable. And so there's been a very nice evolution. This is kind of a nice add on to great community great customers for these guys. What's the integration like as you work with answerable? Because as more people come on and share and connect in, what's it take? What are some of the challenges? What some of the things that you guys need to do our partners need to do with danceable, >>Right? So contributing is, you know, it's been a little slow, I would say, because firstly, they got a kind of lawn answerable and they gotta learn. You know what sensible galaxy. How can I walk around it? And then there's the networking piece, right? How do I now make it work with F five? You know, is this role good enough? Should I be contributing or not? So we're working closely with, you know, Ned, ops engineers as well as the world changes to kind of say, you know, whatever you think is a good work, so is good enough to go there. So, you know, get your role uploaded on galaxy and, you know, show us what you're doing. It doesn't have to be the best, but just get it out there so way have a lot of workshops. You know, we also have this training on F. I called Super Netapp, which is kind of targeting that walked in that office. Engineers. So we're trying to educate people so that everybody is on board with with us. >>One of the conversation we've been having a lot this week has been about the collaboration between teams and historically that's been a challenge for networking. It's alright. Networking going to sit in the corner, tell me what you need. Oh, wait, You need those things changes. Nope, I'm not gonna do it for you are, you know. Okay, wait, get me a budget in 12 months and we'll get back to you. So, uh, how are things changing? Are they changing enough in your customers environments? >>That's a good question. So it is changing, but it's changing slowly. There's still a lot of silos like nettles. Guys are doing their stuff there. Watch guys are doing their self. But with automation is it's kind of hang in together because, you know, the network's engineers have their domain expertise, develops have tails. But, you know, we were able to get them in the same room because we don't get five and then we don't automation and and then they connect. They're like, Oh, you guys are doing what we've already done So it's happening, But it's so, but it's definitely drops that develops. You don't think this is >>the chairman? We've been covered. A lot of we've had a lot of events. We've talked about programmable infrastructure. Infrastructures code is kind of in the butt when you start getting into the networking side, because very interesting when you can program things, this is a nice future. Head room for Enterprises As their app start to think about micro service is what you're taking on the program ability of networking. How do you guys see that? What's your view? >>So program ability In the networking space, it's it's catching up like just five. As a company, we started with just rest a P. I called. Now we're going to moving to answerable to F eyes. Also coming out with this AP I call declared a baby I we have this F ai automation tow chain where we're kind of abstracting more and more off how much user needs to know about the device but be able to configure it really easily. So we're definitely moving towards that and I see other other networking when there's also kind off moving towards that program ability for sure. >>Did you have any specific customer stories you might be able to share? Understand. You might not be able to give the name of the company, but it's always helps to illustrate. >>Yeah, sure, definitely. So we had one customer who, you know, they had an older or not told a different load balancer. And they want to know my great order, the Air five. So they had a lot of firewall rules and, you know, a lot of policies that they wanted to move over. So they used to have these maintenance windows and move on application at a time, eh? So they started, came across sensible, started using answerable, and they were able to migrate like 5 to 10 applications for maintenance window. And they will, you know, they loved it. They've been using answerable. They've been great providence. Or what goes into our modules, you know, really helping us guiding us as well as to what they need. So they were a great, you know, customer story. Another customer we had was you know, we get a lot of use cases for if I that we want to be able to change an application or the network without incurring any downtime, you know, fail overs, it could be as simple as as broader Sze between data centers or, you know, something simple. But what this company did want to shift between fellow between data centers, they got into answerable, they were able to do it in minutes was his hours and, you know they loved it. >>I got to ask you about a Zen engineer. You think about the data center cloud we get that that's been around that workings been great, getting better as five G and I o. T Edge kind of comes into the picture how routing and networking works with compute and edge devices start to be an opportunity for these kinds of automation. How do you guys view that's future state of EJ and and as the surface area of the network gets larger and the edges really part of the equation now his need for automation great need for seeing observe abilities. Super hot area with micro service is now you got automation kind of Ah, nice area. Expand on. What's your thoughts on beyond the data center >>so beyond the data center. So f five is indifferent clouds right to donate ws as your g c p It's out there. We also have like you know, we've recently collaborated with not collaborated. You know, engine ex has become a part of their five. So, you know, we're out there on definitely with I od and you know, no one date us and the specific that there is a boom off applications and you know, we wantto not be a hindrance to anyone who's trying to automate applications anywhere. So ah, goal is also at five is everywhere and anywhere and securing abs, making them available >>and securities 200 big driver of automation. >>I'm glad you brought up in genetic. So you know, we've been very familiar seeing Engine X at a lot of the cloud shows how Zenger next kind of changing the conversation you're having with customers. >>So having a lot of conversations with develops engineers about an genetics, you know, some of them are already using it in the day to day activity, and, you know, they don't want to see how a five and engine excite gonna gonna come together And you know what kind of solutions we can offer. So if I were working on that strategy, But you know, definitely that there is a link between us and engine aches, and customers are happy to know that. You know, we're kind of now on the same pot, So if they're in the cloud on from, you know, they can choose which one they want, but they're going to get the same support and backing off. Five. >>Great. We're getting towards the end of answerable fests. Give us what you want. Kind of some of the key takeaways. People tohave about five here at the show. >>Sure. You know, if you haven't started automating at five Invincible. My key takeaways, you know, get started. It's really simple. We have sessions now. We have a workshop on those. They look that up a great resource for us. It's just answerable dot com slash five. We have great resources. Um, are answerable. Models are supported, were certified by that had answerable. So, you know, just dive in and start automating >>pale, saying Thank you so much for the update. Really appreciate it. And congratulations on the progress. >>Thank you so much. >>for John, for your arms to minimum, getting towards the end of two days water wall coverage here. Thanks, as always for watching the Cube.

>> Narrator: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering Ansible Fest 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's live coverage of Ansible Fest 2019, here in Atlanta, Gerogia. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host is John Furrier and we're going to dig in and talk a bit about developers. Our guest on the program, Parag Dave, who is senior principle product manager with Red Hat. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Glad to be here, thanks for having me. >> Alright, so configuration management, really maturing into an entire automation journey for customers today, lets get into it. Tell us a little bit about your role and what brings you to the event. >> Yeah, so I actually have a very deep background in automation. I started by doing worker automation. Which is basically about how to help businesses do their processing. So, from processing an invoice, how do I create the flows to do that? And we saw the same thing, like automation was just kind of like a an operational thing and was brought on just to fulfill the business, make it faster and next thing you know it grew like, I don't know, like wildfire. I mean it was amazing and we saw the growth, and people saw the value, people saw how easy it was to use. Now, I think that combination is kicking in. So, now I'm focusing more on developers and the depth tools used at Red Hat and it's the same thing. You know, Parag, you know when you look in IT, you know Automation is not a new term. It's like we've been talking about this for decades. Talk to us a little bit about how it's different today and you know, you talked about some of the roles that are involved here, how does Ansible end up being a developer tool? >> Yeah, you know you see, it's very interesting, because Ansible was never really targeted for developers, right? And in fact, automation was always considered like an operational thing. Well, now what has happened is, the entire landscape of IT in a company is available to be executed programmatically. Before it was, interfaces were only available for a few programs. Everything else you had to kind of write your own programs to do, but now the advent of API's, you know with really rich CLI's it's very easy to interact with anything and not just like in software, you can interact with the other network devices, with your infrastructure, with your storage devices. So, all of the sudden when everything became available, developers who were trying to create applications and needed environments to test, to integrate, saw that automation is a great way to create something that cannot be replicated and be consistent every time you run it. So, the need for consistency and replication drove developers to adopt to the Ansible. And we were, you know cause they had the Ansible, we never marketed to developer and then we see that wow, they are really pulling it down, it's great. The whole infrastructure is code, which is one of the key pillars for devOps has become one of the key drivers for it, because now what you are seeing is the ability for developers to say that I can now, when I'm done with my coding and my application is ready for say a test environment or a staging environment, I can now provision everything I need right from configuring my network devices, getting the infrastructure ready for it, run my test, bring it down, and I can do all of that through code, right? So, that really drives the adoption for Ansible. >> And the could scale has shown customers at scale, whether its on-premises or cloud or Edge is really going to be a big factor in their architecture. The other thing that's interesting, and Stu were talking about this on our opening yesterday, is that you have the networking and the bottom of that stack moving up the stack and you have the applications kind of wanting to move down the stack. So, they're kind of meeting in the middle in this programmability in between them. You know, Containers, Kubernetes, Microservices, is developing as a nice middle layer between those two worlds. So, the networks have to telegraph up data and also be programmable, this is causing a lot of disruption and evasion. >> Parag: Absolutely. >> You're thought on this, 'cause it's DevSecOps beefs DevOps, that's DeVops. This is now all that's coming together. Exactly, and what's happening is, what we are seeing with developers is that there's a lot more empowerment going on. You know, before there was like a lot of silo's, there was like a lot of checks and balances in place that kind of made it hard to do things. It was okay, this what you, developers you write code, we will worry about all this. And now, this whole blending that has happened and developers being empowered to do it. And now, the empowerment is great and with great power comes great responsibility. SO, can you please make sure that you know, what you're using is enterprise grade, that it's going to be you know, you're not just doing things with your break environment So, once everybody become comfortable that yes, by merging these things together, we're actually not breaking things. You're actually increasing speed, 'cause what's the number one driver right now for organizations? Is speed with security, right? Can I achieve that business agility, so that by the time I need a feature develop, by the time I need a feature delivered in production and my tool comes for it, I need to close that gap. I cannot have a long gap between that. So, we are seeing a lot of that happening. >> People love automation, they love AI. These are two areas that, it's a no-brainer. When you have automation, you talk AI, yeah bring it on, right? What does that mean? So, when you think about automation the infrastructure that's in the hands of the operators, but also they want to enable applications to do it themselves as well, hence the DevOps. Where is the automation focus? Because that's the number one question. How do I land, get the adoption, and then expand out across. This seems to be the form that Ansible's kind of cracked the code on. The organic growth has been there, but now as a large enterprise comes in, I got to get the developers using it and it's got to be operator friendly. This seems to be the key, >> The balance has to be there >> the key to the kingdom. >> Yeah, no you're absolutely right. And so, when you look at it, like what do developers want? So, something that is frictionless to use, very quick, very easy, and so that I don't have to spend a lot of time learning it and doing it, right? And so we saw that with Ansible. It's like the fact that it's so easy to use, it's most of everything is in YAML. Which is very needed for developers, right? So, we see that from their perspective, they're very eager now, and they've been adopting it, if you look at the download stats it tells you. Like there's a lot of volume happening in terms of developers adopting it. What companies are now noticing is that, wait that's great, but now we have a lot developers doing their own thing. So, there is now like way of bringing all this together, right? So, it's like if I have 20 teams in one line of business and each team tries to do things their own way, what I'm going to end up with is a lot of repeatable, you know like a lot of work that gets repeated, I say it's duplicated. So, we see that's what we are seeing with collections for example. What Ansible is trying to bring to the table is okay, how do I help you kind of bring things into one umbrella? And how can I help you as a developer decide that, wow I got like 100 plus engine extra rolls I can use in Ansible. Well, which one do I pick? And you pick one, somebody else picks something else, Somebody creates a playbook with like one separate, you know one different thing in it, versus yours. How do we get our hands around it? And I think that's where we are seeing that happen. >> Right open star standpoint. I see Red Hat, Ansible doing great stuff and for the folks in the ivory tower, the executive CXO'S. They hear Ansible, glue layer, integration layer, and they go, wait a minute isn't that Kubernetes? Isn't Kubernetes suppose to provide all this stuff? So, talk about where Ansible fits in the wave that's coming with Kubernetes. Pat Gelsinger at VMware, thinks Kubernetes is going to be the dial-tone, it's going to be like the TCP/IP like protocol, to use his words, but there's a relationship that Ansible has with those Microservices that are coming. Can you explain that fit? >> You hit the nail on the head. Like, Kubernetes is like, we call it the new operating system. It's like that's what everything runs on now, right? And it's very easy for us, you know from a development perspective to say, great I have my Containers, I have my applications built, I can bring them up on demand, I don't have to worry about you know having the whole stack of an operating system delivered every time. So, Kubernetes has become like the defactual standard upon which things run. So, one of the concepts that has really caught a lot of momentum, is the operator framework, right? Which was introduced with the Kubernetes, the later Razor 3.x. Some of that, and operator framework, it's very easy now for application teams. I mean, it's not a great uptake from software vendors themselves. How do I give you my product, that you can very easily deliver on Kubernetes as a Container, but I'll give you enough configuration options, you can make it work the way you want to. So, we saw a lot oof software vendors creating and delivering their products as operators. Now we are seeing that a lot of software application developers themselves, for their own applications, want to create operators. It's a very easy way of actually getting your application deployed onto Kubernetes. So, Ansible operator is one of the easiest ways of creating an operator. Now, there are other options. You can do a Golang operator, you can do Helm, but Ansible operators has become extremely easier to get going. It doesn't require additional tools on top of it. Just because the operator SDK, you know, you're going to use playbooks. Which you're used to already and you're going to use playbooks to execute your application workflows. So, we feel that developers are really going to use Ansible operators as a way to create their own operators, get it out there, and this is true for any Kubernetes world. So, there's nothing different about, you know an Ansible operator versus any other operator. >> With no chains to Kubernetes, but Kubernetes obviously has the cons of the Microservices, which is literally non-user intervention. The apps take of all provisioning of services. This is an automation requirement, this feeds into the automation theme, right? >> Exactly, and what this does for you is it helps you, like if you look at operator framework, it goes all the way from basic deployers, everybody's use to, like okay, I want instantaneous deployment, automatically just does it. Automatically recognize changes that I give you in reconfiguration and go redeploy a new instance the way it should. So, how do I automate that? Like how do I ensure that my operator that is actually running my application can set up it's own private environment in Kubernetes and then it can actually do it automatically when I say okay now go make one change to it. Ansible operator allows you to do that and it goes all the way into the life cycle, the full five phases of life cycle that we have in the operator framework. Which is the last one's about autopilot. So, Autoscale, AutoRemedy itself. Your application now on Kubernetes through Ansible can do all that and you don't have to worry about coding at all. It's all provided to you because of the Ansible operator. >> Parag, in the demo this morning, I think the audience really, it resonated with the audience, it talked about some of the roles and how they worked together and it was kind of, okay the developers on this side and the developers expectation is, oh the infrastructure's not going to be ready, I'm not going to have what I need. Leave me alone, I'm going to play my video games until I can actually do my work and then okay, I'll get it done and do my magic. Speak a little bit to how Ansible is helping to break through those silo's and having developers be able to fully collaborate and communicate with all their other team members not just be off on their own. >> Oh yeah, that's a good point, you know. And what is happening is the developers, like what Ansible is bringing to the table is giving you a very prescriptive set of rules that you can actually incorporate into your developer flows. So, what developers are now doing is that I can't create a infrastructure contribution without actually having discussions with the infrastructure folks and the network team will have to share with me what is the ideal contribution I should be using. So, the empowerment that Ansible brings to the table is enabled cross team communications to happen. So, there is prescriptive way of doing things and you can create this all into an automation and then just set up so that it gets triggered every time a developer makes a change to it. So, internally they do that. Now other teams come and say, hey how are you doing this? Right, 'cause they need they same thing. Maybe you're destinations are going to be different obviously, but in the end the mechanism is the same, because you are under the same enterprise, right? So, you're going to have the same layer of network tools, same infrastructure tools. So, then teams start talking to each other. I was talking to the customer and they were telling me that they started with four teams working independently, building their own Ansible playbooks and then talking to the admins and next thing they know everybody had the full automation done and nobody knew about it. And now they're finding out and they were saying, wow, I got like hundreds of these teams doing this. So, A, I'm very happy, but B, now I would like these guests to talk to each other more and come up with a standard way of doing it. And going back to that collections concept. That's what's really going to help them. And we feel that with the collections it's very similar to what we did with Operator Hub for the OpenShift. It's where we have certified set of collections, so that they're supported by Red Hat. We have partners who contribute theirs and then they're supported by them, but we become a single source. So, as an enterprise you kind of have this way of saying, okay now I can feel confident about what I'm going to let you deploy in my environment and everybody's going to follow the same script and so now I can open up the floodgates in my entire organization and go for it. >> Yeah, what about how are people in the community getting to learn form everyone else? When you talk about a platform it should be if I do something not only can by organization learn from it, but potentially others can learn from it. That's kind of the value proposition of SaaS. >> Yes, yes it and having the galaxy offering out there, where we see so many users contributing, like we have close to a hundred thousand rolls out there now and that really brought the Ansible community together. It was already a strong community of contributors and everything. By giving them a platform where they can have these discussions, where they can see what everybody else is doing, it's the story is where you will now see a lot more happening like today, I think it was Ansible is like the top five Get Up projects in terms of progress that are happening out there. I mean the community is so wide run, it's incredible. Like they're driving this change and it's a community made up of developers, a lot of them. And that's what's creating this amazing synergy between all the different organizations. So, we feel that Ansible is actually bringing a lot of us together. Especially, as more and more automation becomes prevalent in the organizations. >> Alright, Parag want to give you a final word, Ansible Fest 2019, final take aways. >> No, this is great, this is my first one and I'd never been to one before and just the energy, and just seeing what all the other partners are also sharing, it's incredible. And Like I said with my backgrounds automations, I love this, anything automation for me, I think that's just the way to go. >> John: Alright, well that's it. >> Stu: Thank you so much for sharing the developer angle with us >> Thank you very much. >> For John Furrier, I'm Stu Miniman. Back to wrap-up from theCUBe's coverage of Ansible Fest 2019. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (intense music)

>> 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)

>> Narrator: Live from Atlanta, Georgia it's theCube covering AnsibleFest 2019, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back, this is theCube's coverage of AnsibleFest 2019, here in Atlanta Georgia, I'm Stu Miniman, real excited to be at this event for the first time, getting to talk to a number of the practitioners, talking to some of the executives, and to give us a slightly different angle on it, we're really going to talk about education and what's happening in this space. And joining me, first time guest on the program, Carlos Caicedo, who is an associate professor at Syracuse University. Carlos thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, thanks for inviting me. >> All right, so Syracuse, the snow belt hasn't hit yet for 2019 up your neck of the woods, - [Carlos] Yeah. >> but you know tell us a bit about what you know, you do, the programs you work on, and then we'll get into how much automation is a piece of that. >> Okay, so I'm professor at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University and two years ago, we decided to launch a new masters degree program on enterprise data systems that focuses on cloud technologies, automation, scripting and all that's required now a days to manage and work with the infrastructure that data centric enterprises need now a days. Basically we saw this need because the traditional way of working with infrastructure, from the command line interface wasn't going to cut it anymore. You need to work with scale, new concepts, APIs, git, continualization, virtualization. So we needed to create a program that replace our traditional networking program and modernize it and bring it up to speed with what's currently happening in the industry. >> I think that's great, you know we talk about what is, how do we close the gap between what, you know, business needs, what skillsets are needed, and what's coming out of university. You know for a long time, it was like okay, let's get everybody in computer sciences and do that, but you know, whatever programming language you learn today, it's like oh boy, it seems to change and be out of date there, and if you talk about a masters degree, in IT we're working with, you know, how does the technology and the business, how do they work together. - [Carlos] Yeah. So I have to imagine that this, that masters level helps prepare your students to kind of live in that world. >> Yes, we're a bit different than what you would call a traditional network engineering degree, which focuses a lot on the technology. We imbed or try to give our students also a business perspective so they learn management, information management, or management concepts for information professionals, information policy concepts, so you understand the business side, but then we also imbed a lot of technology components into the curriculum. So the idea is to have this kind of multi-disciplinary hybrid professional, that understands that whatever is being worked at the infrastructural level needs to support the goals of the business and can walk those worlds, be a good participant in teams. Collaboration is the key now a days as we've seen. >> So Carlos, what prerequisites do your students have to have coming in, I mean do they need to be certified on certain network gear or you know what do they need to understand, and what do you give them that might be different than what they would have gotten out in industry? >> Well, preferably, students that come in should have some knowledge of networking the TCP IP stack, basically, what routing an IP address is, and from there on they'll see courses on advanced networking, scripting, cloud management, cloud architecture, and so forth, and plus the business side as I mentioned, to get them prepared for the real world. >> Okay, one of the things that was, you know, greatly talked about here is really that evolution of automation. You know how do we move it from being a just you know, tactical. One of the keynotes speakers yesterday talked about the whack-a-mole I'm going to solve all of these little problems to a more strategic view. How have you been seeing in, how does the evolution of automation impact your curriculum? >> Well, that's a great question. So the idea is not to have automation for the sake of automation. Like you said we need the business focus and whoever is participating in a team and moving the automation story forward needs to be conscious that the end goal is to support business. However, in terms of how it has impacted our curriculum, we embedded automation in several of our courses because that's the way to go in the future, you can't just cut it with, you know, a device by device kind of approach. So everything now a days changes too quickly and the demands for businesses to respond to these changes require a quick turnaround for whatever the infrastructure needs to provide to support the business. So we need to build professionals that understand this and can apply innovation to their benefit and to the benefit of their enterprise. >> Now one of the interesting conversations we've had this week is that the software, the technology, is actually hoping to drive some of the collaboration and communication between groups and roles. How much of that, does that get touched on at all, you know when you talk about working with the business and doing all that? >> Yes, so we kind of build on team based assignments and labs just to get students to understand they're going to have to be part of a team. And you might have people that speak a different language than you or at a different level than you. Let's say more business-oriented, more process-oriented, more technology-oriented but you have to be, well at least a professional would prefer, you have to be that glue that keeps the team cohesive and working together to a common goal. So yeah, collaboration is key and we've seen that in this event, it's all about changing the culture and having this positive approach towards being collaborative. And we're hoping that we're building professionals that from day one understand this and can be part of a team. >> All right, so you talk about that collaboration, I'm curious, in higher education, you know, how is what you're doing impacting your peers, how do you learn from both your peers and education as well as in industry? >> Well, so, at least at our university we have a culture of collaboration between different departments and disciplines. We might work a lot with engineering, we might work a lot with the business school, law school. So again, to bring this interdisciplinary knowledge to students. We also like to reach out to industry and build partnerships, build bridges so that we can leverage some of the resources they have you know to promote or educate people on their products, but also to get students to actually be very hands on and work with things that are out there in the real world. So the idea is that they can speak the same language as many professionals that are already out there. >> Can you speak to you know, Red Hat's participation, how are they partnering and enabling what your mission is? >> So I've been using Ansible in several of my courses and so we have a scripting course, just to mention one, where we do a lot of modules on Ansible and again to understand this concept of mass automation, that automation is the key element for moving infrastructure and having infrastructure deliver goals in the future. So we partner in such that we get to use their products in an easy way and we keep on building new bridges to use more of their products. Now with the announcement of the automation platform, I really want to dig into that and start building new labs for students on that platform. >> Stu: Okay so sounds like you're excited by the announcement. - Oh yeah. >> Anything particular that you know caught your eye on that? It sounds like, you know, the networking pieces with collections seems like something that might be useful. >> Yes, so, well being an information school we're big on data right, so now you have the story of being able to automate a device or a service level, putting that into Ansible tower, doing access control, monitoring and then collecting statistics based on that. Monitoring the performance of your playbooks, monitoring the performance of your automation tasks. So having that data, that analytic side for example, is quite exciting for an information school because we might get some ideas as to how to leverage that in the future. >> So I'm wondering if you could share kind of, you know, what your students think about automation in general. You know if you talk about just the general workforce, you know, over the years there's sometimes that fear oh the robots and the automations are going to takeover you know, what I'm doing, you know, is there any of that fear from the generation, or does working with the technology, you know, help enable what they're looking to do? >> Well, it's definitely kind of a mixed bag. So until students get introduced to tools like Ansible, they do have some fear that well now it's like one person can do the work of 20 or 30 people. But once they understand the story of, you know, tools like Ansible, they change their focus. I had two students at the AnsibleFest last year and they were amazed about looking at the way that many enterprises are using automation. So it's not just about taking out these mundane tasks that network managers have to do, it's getting the time to actually innovate, to be creative, get rid of those tasks that occupy time but are not really important, minimum tasks to get the ship moving along, but then build on top of that to create new products and services. >> It's interesting if you look at the research on it, you know, information technology often has not had the efficiency increases of kind of worker productivity that you might expect and definitely not to the point that it's going to be, you know, massive, you know, job, you know, killing of jobs, you know, hopefully, you know, when we talk to some of the people here it should improve your job satisfaction, hopefully get rid of some of those oh my gosh I got to spend, you know, every fifth weekend, you know, working on this and we can automate some of those away, but yeah there's that disconnect between the reality and, you know, what the technology's actually doing. >> Yes, yeah you don't want to be putting fires every weekend or everyday. And you want to bring additional, how you do to the enterprise and I think that's what automation allows in a big way. >> Great so Carlos you've been to AnsibleFest before, give us your impression so far, the event this week and some of the key things that you, you know, have been or are looking to take away from AnsibleFest 2019. >> Well as I mentioned before, the automation platform definitely want to look into that. I think the way that people are talking about collaboration around automation is very important. I think that kind of validates the team based focus and approach to some of our assignments at least at the program level. Also, I think that the way that companies are now telling their stories of automation. It's pretty neat, I hope to bring some of them into the curriculum. I just saw one from these guys from New Zealand, that they had come, they had videos as to how they implemented some big massive automation and tasks. That was pretty interesting. So hopefully I get to take some of what I've learned here into the curriculum. >> And you know, just a final thing, you know, how prevalent are these, you know, curriculums of automation throughout the country, you know, any data on that? >> Well that's a good question, so basically I would split the university so the program's like in three groups. So you have one group that's developing programs mostly on the network engineering side, very very technical. Other group that probably hasn't really catched on the evolution of networking and probably just teaching networking in the same traditional manner, you know, hoping to get people prepared for cisco certification, certifications of other types, very static, traditional network construction. And then another group which would be kind of in the middle where it's not fully about the technology, it's also about the business and how much you concentrate on both sides can, is where we can distinguish each of these programs. So, besides us I think there are a couple smaller universities that are also preparing these transitions. It's a hard thing to do because things change so quickly and it's hard for faculty to keep up and we want to deliver up to date content to students and it's extremely difficult. My content changes by at least a third from year to year, so I have prepare new slides, new assignments, new labs, get more infrastructure. It's very exciting, but also very challenging and so, we hope that our students are built to embrace change, prepare for it and not oppose it. >> I think it's a great mission, you know, but not only does you know, the technology and the business need to work close together but we know that the only constant in our industry is change. - [Carlos] Yes. So being prepared for, as a workforce, to be able to, you know, live in that and thrive in that environment is so critically important. Carlos, thank you so much for sharing with us, you know, the curriculum at Syracuse and, you know, we look forward to catching up with you in the future. >> Thank you. >> All right we'll be back with lots more coverage, I'm Stu Miniman, John Furrier is also in the house, it's our two days live coverage here from AnsibleFest 2019. Atlanta, thanks for watching theCube.

>> Announcer: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering AnsibleFest 2019, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone, it's CUBE's live coverage here in Atlanta, Georgia, for AnsibleFest 2019, and I'm John Furrier, with Stu Miniman, my co-host. Our next guest is Massimo Ferrari, product manager with Ansible Security. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks very much. Thank you for having me. >> So, security, obviously, big part of the conversation in automation. >> Obviously. >> Making things more efficient, making security, driving a lot of automation, obviously, job performance, among other things. Red Hat's done a lot of automation in other areas outside of just configuration, network automation, now security looking kind of like the same thing, but security's certainly different and more critical. >> Massimo: It is, it's more time-sensitive-- >> Talk us through the security automation angle, what's going on? >> Well, basically, there are several things going on, right? I believe the main thing is that IT organizations are changing, well, honestly, IT organizations have been changing for the last, probably five years, 10 years, and as a consequence, the infrastructures to be protected are changing as well. And there are a couple of challenges that are kind of common to other areas. As you said, automation is all over the place, so clearly, there are some challenges that are common to IT operations, or network operations, something that is peculiar for the security space. What we are seeing, basically, is that if you think about, there's a major problem of scale, right? If you think about the adoption of technologies like containers, or private and public cloud, if you are a large organization, you are introducing those technologies side by side with, for example, your legacy applications on bare metal or your fantastic digital machines, but what they do actually is introducing a problem of size, a problem of scale, and a problem of complexity connected to that, and a problem of distribution which is just unmanageable without automation. And the other problem is just complexity, that I mentioned before, is, I wasn't specifically referring to the complexity of the infrastructure per se. If we think about adopting best practices or practices like microservices or adopting functions of service, we can easily imagine how an old-school three-tiers application can be re-engineered to become something like with made of 10 hundred components, and those are microcomponents, very focused on single things, but from a security perspective, those are ingress points. And what automation did, what automation proved to be able to do, is to manage complexity for other areas. So you can be successful in IT operations, in network, and clearly, it can be successful in security, but what is unique to security is that professionals are facing a problem of speed, which means different things, but to give you an example, what we are seeing is that more and more cyberattacks are using automation and artificial intelligence, and the result of that is that the velocity and impact of those attacks is so big that you can't cope with human operators, so we are in a classic situation of fighting fire with fire. >> So, this is a great example. We had the service guys on earlier talking about the Automation Platform, and one comment was, "You don't want to boil the ocean over. "Focus on some things you can break down "and show some wins." Security professionals have that same problem, they want to throw automation and AI at the problem, "It's going to solve everything." >> Of course. >> And so, it's certainly very valuable, managing configurations, open ports, S3 buckets, there's a variety of things that are entry points for hackers and adversaries to come in, take down networks. What's the best practice? How would you see customers applying automation? What's the playbook, if you will? What's the formula for a customer to look at security and say, "Okay, how do I direct Ansible "at my security problems, or opportunities, "to manage that?" >> Well, when you discuss security automation with customers, it really depends on the kind of audience that you have. As you know, security organizations tend to be fairly structured, right? And depending on the person you are talking to, they may have a slightly different meaning for security automation. It's a broader practice in general. What we are trying to do with Ansible Security Automation is we are targeting a very specific problem. There is a well-known issue in the security world, which is the lack of integration. What we know is that if you are any large organization, you buy tens, hundred sometime, of security solutions, and those are great, they protect whatever they have to protect, but there is little to no integration between them, and the result of that is that security teams have an incredible amount of manual work to do just to correlate data coming from different dashboards, or to perform an investigation across different perimeters, or at some point, they have to remediate something that is going on and they have to apply this remediation across groups of devices that are sparse. And what we are trying to do with Ansible Security Automation is to propose Ansible as an integrational layer, as a glue, between all those different technologies. On one hand it's a matter of become more efficient, streamline the process. On the other hand is an idea of having, truly, a way to plan, use the automation as your action plan, because security is obiously is time-critical, and so, automation becomes, in this context, become even more important. >> Massimo, with the launch of the Ansible Automation Platform, we see a real enhancement of how the ecosystem's participating here. Where does security fit into the collections that are coming from the partner ecosystem of Ansible? >> Well, in one way, we have been building over the shoulders of our friends in Network Automation. They did an amazing job over four years. They did two major things. The first one is that they expanded for the first time the footprint of Ansible outside the traditional IT operations space. That was amazing. And we did kind of the same thing, and we started working with some vendors that were already working with us for slightly different use cases, and we helped them to identify the right use cases for security, and expand even more what they were capable of doing through Ansible. And what we are doing now is basically working with customers, we have lighthouse customers, we call them, that guide us to understand which is the next step that we are supposed to perform, and we are gathering together a security community around Ansible. Because surprisingly, we all know that the security community has always been there, always been super vocal, but open-sourcing security's a fairly new thing, right? And so we have this ability, the important thing is that we all know that Red Hat is not a security vendor, right? We don't want to be a security vendor. That's not the ambition that we have. We are automation experts, in the case of Ansible, and we are open-source experts across the board. So what we are doing with them, we are helping them to get there, to cooperate in the open-source world. And for security, proven to be very interesting the adoption of collection, because in some way allows them to deliver the content that they want to deliver in a very, I would say, focused way, and since security relies on, again, is a matter of time to market or time to solve the problem, through collection, they have more independence, they are capable to deliver whatever they want to deliver, when they want to deliver, according to their staff needs. >> You know, one of the things you mentioned, glue layer, integration layer, and open source, your expertise on automation. It's interesting, and I want to get your reaction to this, 'cause we did a survey of CISOs in our community prior to the Amazon Web Services re:Inforce conference this past summer. It was their first, inaugural, cloud security, so, yeah, cloud security was a big part of it. But with on-premise and hybrid and multi-cloud here, being discussed, this notion of what cloud and role of enterprise is interesting to the CISOs, chief information security officer. And the trend on the survey was is that CISOs are re-hiring internal development teams to build stacks onsite in their own organizations, investing in their stack, and they're picking a cloud, and then a secondary cloud. So as that development team picks up, that seems to be a trend, one, do you agree with that? And if people want to have their own developers in-house, for security purposes, how does Ansible fit into that glue layer? Because if it's configuring all the gear and all the pipes and plumbing, it makes sense to kind of think about that. So this might be a trend that's helping you? >> So, the trend, there is a general trend in the corporate enterprise world hat more technical people are coming into traditionally, in areas that are traditionally under the purview of other people or domains, right? So, more technical people coming into business lines. We are seeing more developers coming into security, that's certainly a trend. It is a matter of managing scale and complexity. You need to have technical people there. So, in one hand, that help us to create a more efficient and more pervasive community around security. You have developers there, which means that you need to serve that corner case that you are not targeted at the moment, you have talented people that can cooperate with us and build those kinds of things. >> John: And use the open-source software. (laughs) >> Exactly, but that's the entire purpose, right? You want to drive people to contribute. They get the value back, we get the value back, they get the value back, that's the entire purpose. >> So you do see the trend of more developers being hired by enterprises in-house? >> It certainly is, and it's been going on for about, probably three to five years I've seen that, in other areas, mainly in the business area, because they want to gain that agility and want to be self-contained, in some way. Business want to be self-contained, and security, in some sense, is going the same direction. That fits clearly one angle of Ansible, so you have more contribution in the community. On the other hand, what we are trying to make sure is that we support the traditional security teams. Traditional security teams are not super developmental yet, so they want to consume the content. >> Well, DevOps is always, as infrastructure as code implies that the infrastructure has been coded, and if you look at all of the security breaches that have been big, a lot of them have been basic stuff. An exposed S3 bucket, is that Amazon's fault, or is that the operator's fault? Or patches that aren't deployed. You guys are winning with Ansible in these area. This seems to be a nice spot for you guys to come in. I mean, can you elaborate on those points, and is that true, you guys winning in those areas? 'Cause, I mean, I could see automation just solving a lot of those problems. >> Well, I will say something that's not super popular, but as a security community, we've always been horrible at the basics, right? Like any other technical people, we're chasing the latest and greatest, the fun stuff, the basics, we always been bad at that. Automation is a fairly new thing in security, And what we all know that automation does is providing you consistency and reduce human error. Most of this stuff is because somebody forgot to configure something, someone forgot to rotate a secret or something like that. >> They didn't bring their playbook to the game. (laughs) >> So, I'm not trying to guide the priorities here, but the point is that the same benefits that we get from automation-- >> There's just no excuse. If you have automation, you can basically-- >> Exactly. >> Load that patch, or configure that port properly, because a playbook exists. This only helps. >> Absolutely, but those are the basic values of automation. You're communicating a slightly different way to security, because they use different language, and for them, automation is still a new thing. But what you heard during the keynote, so, the entire purpose of the platform is to help different areas in the IT organization to cooperate with each other. As we know, security is not a problem of IT security anymore. It's a broader problem and needs to have a common tool to be solved. >> In the demo in the keynote this morning, I thought that they did a good job showing how the various stakeholders in the organization can all collaborate and work together. I want you to explain how security fits into that discussion, and also, they hadn't added the hardening piece in there, but I would expect for many companies that, I want to flag when I'm creating this image, that it's going to say, "Hey, "have you put the right security policies on top of it," not something that they just, "Oh, it's one of the steps that I do." How do we make sure that everybody follows those corporate edicts that we have? >> Well, it's mainly a matter, I don't want to play the usual card of cultural change, but the fact is that in security, especially, we are looking at two major shifts, and one of these shifts is that pretty much everyone, I would say private organization and government, kind of acknowledge that security, cybersecurity, is not an IT problem anymore, it's a business problem, right? Being a business problem, that means that the stakeholders involved are in all different parts of the organization, and that requires a different level of collaboration. Collaboration starts with training, and enablement of people to understand where the problems are, and understand that they are part of the same process. We used to have security as an highly specialized function of IT, right now, what happens is that, if you think about a data breach, a data breach could be caused by an IT problem, but most of the impact is on the business, right? So right now, a lot of security processes are shifting to give responsibility to the business owners, and if the government is involved, I live in London, and in Europe, for another month, I guess, we have this fantastic thing that you know, it's called GDPR. GDPR forces you to have what is called a data breach notification process, which means that now, if you're investigating a cyberthreat, you want to have legal there to make sure that everything is fine, and if this data breach could become a media thing, you want to have PR there, because you want to have a plan to mitigate whatever kind of impact you may have on your corporate image. You may also want to have there, I don't know, customer care, just to handle the calls from the customer worried for the data. So the point is that this is becoming a process that need to involve people. People needs to be aware that they are part of this process, and what we can do, as an automation provider, we are trying to enable, through the platform, the IT organizations to cooperate with each other. Having workflows, having the ability to contribute to the same process allows you to be responsible for your piece. >> Massimo, the new security track here at the show this year, for those that didn't get to come, or maybe that didn't get to see all of it, some of the highlights you want to share with the audience? >> So, this year, the general message this year is that it's the first time that we have this fantastic security track, and this is not a security conference, it is never going to be a security conference. So what we are trying to do is to enable security teams to talk with the automation experts to introduce automation in that space. So the general message that we have this year is, well, the desire is to create a bridge between the Ansible practitioners, the Ansible heroes, whatever you want to call them, to understand what the problem is, what the problem could be, and have a sort of a common language they can use to communicate. So the message that we have this year is, go back home, and sit down at the same table with your security folks, and make sure that they are aware that there's a new possibility, and you can help them, that you now have a common tool together. We had a couple of very interesting tracks. We have partners, a lot of partners are contributing to security space, we mentioned that before, and most of them have tracks here, and they are showing what they built with us, what are the possibilities of those tools. We have a couple of customer stories that are extremely interesting. I just came out from a session presenting one of our customer stories. And in general, we are trying to show also how you can integrate security in all the broader processes, like the mythical DevSecOps process. >> What's been the feedback from customers specifically around the talk, and the security conversations here at AnsibleFest? >> It wasn't unexpected, but it's going particularly well. We have very good feedbacks. And we have, we kind of-- >> John: What are they saying? >> Well, they are saying some, okay, the best quote that I can give you, the customer told me, "Oh, this year, I learned something new. "I learned that we can do something "in this space that we never thought about." Which is a good feedback to have at a conference. And a lot of people are attending these sessions. We have quite a lot of security professionals, that was kind of unexpected, so all the sessions are pretty full, but we also are seeing people that are just, they're just curious, they're coming in, and they are staying, they are paying attention. So there is the real opportunity, they see the same opportunity that we see, and hopefully, they will bring the message home. >> Massimo, thank you for coming on theCUBE and sharing your insights. Certainly, security is a main driver for automation, one of the key four bullet points that we outlined in our opening. Thanks for coming on, and sharing your insights. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> It's theCUBE coverage here at AnsibleFest 2019, where Red Hat's announced their Ansible Automation Platform. I'm John Furrier, with Stu Miniman. Stay with us for more after this short break. (upbeat music)

>>live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the Q covering Answerable Fest 2019. Brought to you by >>Red Hat. >>Okay, welcome back. It runs two cubes. Live coverage of Ansel Fest here in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm John for a host of the Cube with stewed Minutemen. Analysts were looking angle. The Cube are next to guest Tom Anderson and most product owner. Red Hat is part of the sensible platform automation properly announced. And Richard Henshaw, product manager. Guys, welcome to the Cube Way had all the execs on yesterday and some customers all pretty jazzed up about this year, mainly around just the timing of how automation is really hitting the scene and some of the scale that's going on. You guys had big news with the answerable automation platform. New addition to the portfolio. What's the feedback? >>So far, I think the feedback has been super positive. We have customers have come to us. A lot of the last little one said, Hey, we're maturing. We're moving along the automation maturity curve, right, and we have multiple teams coming to us and saying, Hey, can you help us connect this other team? We've had a lot of success doing cloud provisioning or doing network automation were doing security automation. What have you and they're coming to us and saying, Help us give us kind of the story if you will, to be able to connect these other teams in our organization. And so that way I kind of feel the pole for this thing to move from a tool that automates this or that. This task for that task. Too much more of a platform center. >>It seems to be scaling out in terms of what automation is touching these days. And look at the numbers six million plus activations on get Hub versus other projects. So activities high in the community. But this seems to be much more broader. Scope now. Bring more things together. What's the rationale behind? What's the reasoning? What's the strategy? But the main thing is, >>automation is got to that point where it's becoming the skill set that we do. So it was always the focus. You know, I'm a database administrator. I'm assists out, man. I'm a middle where I'm a nap deaf on those people, then would do task inside their job. But now we're going to the point off, actually, anybody that can see apiece. Technology can automate piece technology in the clouds have shown This is the way to go forward with the things what we had. We bring that not just in places where it's being created from scratch, a new How do you bring that into what's existing? Because a lot of our customers have 20 or 30 years like a heritage in the I T estate. How do you do with all of that? You can't just rebuild everything into new as well. So you gotta be ableto automate across both of those areas and try and keep. You know, we say it's administrative efficiency versus organization effectiveness. Now how do I get to the point of the organization? Could be effective, supposed just doing things that make my job easier. And that's what we're gonna bring with applying automation capability that anybody can take advantage of. >>Richard. I actually felt the keynote demo this morning did a nice job of that line that they set it up with is this is this is tools that that all the various roles and teams just get it, and it's not the old traditional okay, I do my piece and set it up and then throw it over the wall. There was that, you know? Oh, I've got the notification and then some feedback loops and, you know, we huddled for something and it gets done rather fast, not magic. It's still when I get a certain piece done. Okay, I need to wait for it's actually be up and running, but you know, you're getting everybody into really a enterprise collaboration, almost with the tool driving those activities together >>on that. And that's why yesterday said that focus on collaboration is the great thing. All teams need to do that to be more successful because you get Maur inclusivity, Maurin puts. But organizations also need to coordinate what activities they're doing because they have rules, regulations, structures and standards they have to apply. Make sure that those people can do things in a way that's guided for them so that they're they're effective at what they're trying to do. >>Okay, I think I'm going to explain what's in the platform first because an engine and tower and there, what else is in there, what's new? What's what our customers is going to see. That's new. That's different >>it's the new components are automation Hope Collections, which is a technology inside answer ball itself. On also Automation Analytics and the casing is that engine and terrorist of the beating heart of the platform. But it's about building the body around the outside. So automation is about discover abilities like, What can we find out? What automation can I do that I'm allowed to do? Um, and let six is about the post activity. So I've automated all these things. I've done all this work well, How did it go? Who did what, who did? How much of what? How well did it work? How much did it failed? Succeeds and then, once you build on that, you don't start to expand out into other areas. So what? KP eyes, How much of what I do is automated versus no automated? You can start to instigate other aspects of business change, then Gamification amongst teams. Who's the Who's the boat? The closest motive here into the strategy input source toe How? >>Find out what's working right, essentially and sharing mechanism to for other groups in terms of knowing what's happening >>and how is my platform performing which areas are performing well, which airs might not be performing well. And then, as we move down the road, kind of how my performing against my peers are other organizations that are automating using the ants will automation platform doing? And am I keeping up on my doing better? That kind of stuff. >>So, Tom, there's a robust community as we was talking about. Their platform feels like it builds on yet to change the dynamic a little bit. When you talk about the automation hub and collections, you've already got a long list of the ecosystem vendors that are participating here. Bring us two through a little bit. What led Thio. You know all these announcements and where you expect, you know, how would this change the dynamics of >>the body? And maybe we'll split up that question. I'll talk a little bit about partners because it's both partners and customers in community here that's been driving us this way. I'll talk a little bit about partners and Rich talk about the customer piece here, which is partners have been traditionally distributing their content there. Ansel automation content through our engine capability. So our engine release cycle, or cadence, has been sort of the limiting factor to how fast they can get content out to their users and what what the collections does is part of the platforms allows us to separate those things. Rich talked about it yesterday in his keynote, having that stable platform. But you having yet having content be able to read fast. And our partners love that idea because they can content. They can develop content, create content, get into their users hands faster. So partners like at five and Microsoft you've seen on stage here are both huge contributors. And they've been part of the pole for us to get to the platform >>from a customer perspective. And the thing I love most about doing this job with the gas of customers is because I was a customer on Guy was danceable customer, and then I came over to this side on Dhe. I now go and see customers. I see what they've done, and I know what that's what I want to do. Or that's what I was trying to do. And she started to see those what people wanted to achieve, and I was said yesterday it is moving away from should I automate. How would we automate Maura? What should I automate? And so we'll start to see how customers are building their capabilities. And there's no there's many different ways people do. This is about different customers, >>you know. What's interesting is you guys have such a great success formula first. Well, congratulations. It's great to see how this is turning into such a wider market, because is not just the niche configuration management. More automation become with cloud to point a whole new wider category. So congratulations. The formula we see with success is good product, community customers adopting and then ecosystem that seems to be the successful former in these kinds of growth growth waves you guys experiencing? What is the partnering with you mentioned? S five Microsoft? Because that, to me, is gonna be a tipping point in a tel sign for you guys because you got the community. You got the customers that check check ecosystem. What's the partner angle? How do they involve? Take us through that. What's going on? They're >>so you're absolutely so you know, kind of platform velocity will be driven by partner adoption and how many things customers can automate on that platform or through that platform and for us I mean, the example was in the demo this morning where they went to the automation hub and they pulled down the F five collection, plugged it into a workflow, and they were automating. What are partners? Experience through their customers is Look, if I'm a customer, I have a multi cloud environment or hybrid cloud environment. I've got automation from AWS. I've got azure automation via more automation. Five. Got Sisko. I've got Palo Alto. I've got all these different automation tools to try and string them together, and the customers are coming and telling those vendors Look, we don't want to use your automation to end this automation tooling that one we want to use Ansel is the common substrate if you will automation substrate across this platform. So that's motivating the partners to come to us and say, Hey, I had I was out five Aspire last week, and they're all in a natural. I mean, it's really impressive to see just how much there in unanswerable and how much they're being driven by their customers when they do Ansell workshops without five, they say the attendance is amazing so they're being pulled by their customers and therefore the partners are coming to us. And that's driving our platform kind of usability across the across the scale. >>Another angle we'll see when we talk to the engineers of the partners that are actually doing the work to work with danceable is that they're seeing is ah, change also in how they it's no longer like an individual customer side individual day center because everything is so much more open and so much more visible. You know there's value in there, making it appealing and easy for their customers to gain advantage of what they're doing. And also the fact that the scales across those customers as well because they have their internal team's doing it, saying the same things and so bringing them to an automation capable, like Ansel have to push. That means that they also gained some of the customers appreciation for them, making it easier to do their tasking collaboration with us and you know, the best collaborations. We've got some more partners, all initiated by customers, saying Hey, I want you to go and get danceable content, >>the customer driving a lot of behavior, the guest system. Correct. On the just another point, we've been hearing a lot of security side separate sector, but cyber security. A lot of customers are building teams internally, Dev teams building their own stacks and then telling the suppliers a support my AP eyes. So now you start to see more of a P I integration point. Is that something that is gonna be something that you guys gonna be doubling down on? What's that? What's the approach there? How does that partner connected scale with the customers? So we've >>been eso Ansel security automation, which is the automation connecting I. P. S. C. P. S that kind of stuff. It is almost a replay of what we did the network automation space. So we saw a need in the network automation space. We feel that we became a catalyst in the community with our partners and our customers and our and our contributors. And after about three years now, Ansel Network automation is a huge piece of our business and adoption curve. We're doing the exactly see the exact same thing in the security automation space compliance. The side over here, we're talking about kind of automating the connections between your firewalls, your threat detection systems and all that kind of stuff. So we're working with a set of partners, whether it's Cisco, whether it's Palo Alto, whether it's whether it's resilient by the EMS, resilient and being able to connect and automate the connections between the threat and the response and and all of that kind of >>the same trajectory as the network automation >>Zach. Same trajectory, just runnin the same play and it's working out right now. We're on that kind of early part of that curve, that adoption curve, and we have partners jumping in with us. >>You're talking to customers. We've heard certain stories. You know how I got, you know, 1000 hours of work down to a dozen hours of work there. Is there anything built into the tool today that allows them to kind of generate those those hero stats O. R. Any anything along those lines? >>Talk about analytic committee from yes, >>well, again without any analytic side. I mean, those things starts become possible that one of the things we've been doing is turning on Maur more metrics. And it's actually about mining the data for the customer because Tower gives this great focal point for all the automation that's going on. It's somewhere that everything comes through. So when we export that and then we can we can do that work for all the customers rather than have to duel themselves. Then you start to build those pictures and we start with a few different areas. But as we advance with those and start, see how people use them and start having that conversation customers about what data they want to use and how they want to use it, I think that's gonna be very possible. You know, it's so >>important. E think was laid out here nicely. That automation goes from a tactical solution to more strategic, but more and more how customers can leverage that data and be data driven. That's that's gonna drive them for it. And any good customer examples you have of the outcomes. No, you're talking to a lot of >>PS one from this morning. Yeah, >>so I mean, I'll be Esther up this morning, and I think that the numbers they used in the demo that she's like, you know, last year they did 100,000 from launch to the end of the year. 100,000 changes through their platform on this year so far that in a 1,000,000. So now you know, from my recollection, that's about the same time frame on either side of the year. So that's a pretty impressive acceleration. Side of things. We've had other ones where people have said, You know how many times you were telling some customers yesterday? What used to take eight hours to a D R test with 20 or 30 people in for the weekend now takes 12 minutes for two People on the base is just pushing a few buttons just as they go through and confirm everything worked that that type of you can't get away from that type of change. >>J. P. Morgan example yesterday was pretty compelling. I mean, time savings and people are, I mean, this legit times. I mean, we're talking serious order of magnitude, time savings. So that's awesome. Then I want to ask you guys, Next is we're seeing another pattern in the market where amongst your customer base, where it's the same problem being automated, allover the place so playbooks become kind of key as that starts to happen is that where the insights kind of comes in? Can you help us kind of tie that together? Because if I'm a large enterprise with its I'm decentralized or centralized, are organized problem getting more gear? I'm getting more clouds, game or operations. There's more surface area of stuff and certainly five g I ot is coming around the corner. Mention security. All this is expanding to be much more touchpoints. Automation seems to be the killer app for this automation, those mundane task, but also identifying new things, right? Can you guys comment on that? >>Yeah, so maybe I'll start rich. You could jump in, which is a little bit around, uh, particularly those large accounts where you have these different disparate teams taking a approach to automate something, using Ansel and then be able to repeat or reuse that somewhere else. The organization. So that idea of being for them to be able to curate they're automation content that they've created. Maybe they pulled something down from galaxy. Maybe they've got something from our automation husband. They've made it their own, and now they want to curate that and spread it across the organization to either obviously become more efficient, but also in four standards. That's where automation hub is going to come into play here. Not only will it be a repo for certify content from us and our partners, but it will also be an opportunity for them to curate their own content and share it across the organization. >>Yeah, I think when you tie those two things together and you've got that call discover abilities, I had away go and find what I want. And then the next day, the next day, after you've run the automation, you then got the nerve to say, Well, who's who's using the right corporate approved rolls? Who's using the same set of rolls from the team that builds the standards to make sure you're gonna compliant build again, showing the demo That's just admin has his way of doing it, puts the security baseline application on top and you go, Oh, okay, who's running that security baseline continuously every time. So you can both imposed the the security standards in the way the build works. But you can also validate that everybody is actually doing the security standards. >>You what I find fascinating about what you guys are doing, and I think this is came out clearly yesterday and you guys are talking about it. And some of the community conversations is a social construct here. Going on is that there's a cultural shift where the benefits that you guys are throwing off with the automation is creating a network effect within the companies. So it's not just having a slack channel on texting. The servers are up or down. It's much more of a tighter bond between the stakeholders inside the company's. Because you have people from different geography is you have champions driving change. And there's some solidarity happening between the groups of people, whether they're silo door decentralized. So there's a whole new social network, almost a cultural shift that's happening with the standardization of the substrate. Can you guys comment on this dynamic? Did you see this coming? You planning forward? Are you doubling down on it? >>I think so. And we talk about community right on how important that is. But how did you create that community internally and so ask balls like the catalyst so most teams don't actually need to understand in their current day jobs. Get on all the Dev ops, focus tools or the next generation. Then you bring answer because they want to automate, and suddenly they go. Okay, Now I need to understand source control, and it's honest and version. I need to understand how to get pulls a full request on this and so on and so forth on it changes that provides this off. The catalyst for them to focus on what changed they have to make about how they work, because what they wanted to do was something that requires them to do you no good disciplines and good behaviors that previously there was no motivation or need to do. I think >>Bart for Microsoft hit on that yesterday. You know, if you saw Bart Session but their network engineers having to get familiar with concepts of using automation almost like software development, life cycles right and starting to manage those things in repose. And think of it that way, which is intimidating at first for people who are not used to. But once they're over that kind of humping understand that the answer language itself is simple, and our operations person admin can use it. No problem, >>he said himself. Didn't my network engineers have become network developers. >>It's funny watching and talking to a bunch of customers. They all have their automation journey that they're going through. And I hear the Gamification I'm like, Okay, what if I have certain levels I have to reach in it unlocked capabilities, you know, in the community along the way. Maybe that could build a built in the future. >>Maybe it's swag based, you know, you >>get level C shows that nice work environment when you're not talking about the server's down on some slack channel when you're actually focusing on work. Yeah, so that mean that's the shift. That's what I'm saying, going >>firefighting to being able to >>do for throwing bombs. Yeah, wars. And the guy was going through this >>myself. Now you start a lot of the different team to the deaf teams and the ops teams. And I say it would be nice if these teams don't have to talk to complain about something that hadn't worked. It was Mexican figured it was just like I just like to talk to you because you're my friend. My colleague and I'd like to have a chat because everything's working because it's all automated, so it's consistent. It's repeatable. That's a nice, nice way. It can change the way that people get to interact because it's no longer only phoned me up when something's wrong. I think that absent an interesting dynamic >>on our survey, our customer base in our community before things one of the four things that came up was happier employees. Because if they're getting stuff done and more efficient, they have more time to actually self actualizing their job. That becomes an interesting It's not just a checkbox in some HR manual actually really impact. >>And I kind of think the customers we've heard talk rvs, gentlemen, this morning gave me a lot of the fear initially is, well, I automate myself out of a job, and what we've heard from everybody is that's not absolutely That's not actually true at all. It just allows them to do higher value things that, um or pro >>after that big data, that automation thing. That's ridiculous. >>I didn't use it yesterday. My little Joe Comet with that is when I tried to explain to my father what I do. Andi just said Well, in the 19 seventies, they said that computers you mean we'll do a two day week on? That hasn't come >>true. Trade your beeper and for a phone full of pots. But Richard, Thanks for coming on. Thanks for unpacking the ants. Full automation platforms with features. Congratulations. Great to see the progress. Thank you, Jonah. Everybody will be following you guys to Cuba. Coverage here in Atlanta, First Amendment Stevens for day two of cube coverage after this short break.

>>live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the Q covering Answerable Fest 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >>Hey, welcome back, everyone. It's the cubes. Live coverage here in Atlanta, Georgia, for answerable fast. Part of redheads. Big news. Ansel Automation Platform was announced. Among other things, they're great products. I'm John for ear, with my coast to minimum, but two great guests. You unpack all the automation platform features and benefits. Walter Bentley, senior manager. Automation Practicing red hat and vj Job Olu, director of Red Hat Consulting Guys Thanks for coming on. Thanks. So the activity is high. The buzz this year seems to be at an inflection point as this category really aperture grows big time seeing automation, touching a lot of things. Standardization. We heard glue layer standard substrate. This is what answer is becoming so lots of service opportunity, lot of happy customers, a lot of customers taking it to the next level. And a lot of customers trying to consolidate figure out hadn't make answerable kind of a standard of other couples coming in. You guys on the front lines doing this. What's the buzz? What's the main store? What's the top story going on around the service is how to deploy this. What are you guys seeing? >>So I think what we're seeing now is customers. Reactor building automation. For a long time, I have been looking at it at a very tactical level, which is very department very focused on silo. Whether country realizes with this modern develops and the change in how they actually go to the market, they need to bring the different teams together. So they're actually looking at watching my enterprise automation strategy be how to actually take what I've learned in one organization. And I still roll it across the enterprise so that now struggling and figuring out how to be scared, what we have, how do we change the culture of the organization to collaborate a lot more and actually drive automation across enterprise? >>Walter One of the things we've been we've talked about all the time in the Cube, and it's become kind of cliche. Digital transformation. Okay, I heard that before, and three things people process, technology, process and capability you guys have done You mentioned the siloed having capabilities that's been there. Check was done very, very well as a product technology Red hat in the portfolio. Great synergies. We talked about rail integration, all the benefits there. But the interesting thing this year that I've noticed is the people side of the equation is interesting. The people are engaged, is changing their role because automation inherently changes there, function in the organization because it takes away probably the mundane tasks. This is a big part of the equation. You guys air hitting that mark. How do you How are you guys seeing that? How you accelerating that has that changing your job, >>right? So customers are now economy realizing that going after automation in a very tactical manner is not exactly getting them what they want as a far as a return on investment in the automation. And what they're realizing is that they need to do more. And they're coming to us and more of an enterprise architectural level and say we want to talk mortgage grander strategy. And what they're coming to realize is that having just one small team of people that were calling the Dev Ops team is not gonna be ableto drive that adoption across the organization. So what we're trying to do is work with customers to show them how they collaboration in the culture of peace is huge. It's a huge part of adopting automation. Answerable is no longer considered a emerging tech anymore. And and I when I say that, I mean a lot of organizations are using answerable in many different ways. They're past that point, and now they're moving on to the next part, which is what is our holistic strategy and how we're gonna approach automation. And And we wanted leverage danceable, unanswerable tower to do that. >>Does that change how you guys do your roll out your practices in some of your programs? >>Well, we did have to make some adjustments in the sense of recognizing that the cultural piece is a pivotal part of it, and we can go in and we can write playbooks and rolls, and we can do all those things really great. But now we need to go in and help them structure themselves in a way where they can foster that collaboration and keep a moment. >>And I'll actually add on to that so reactive, large, open innovation labs three years ago, and what we have to learn doing that is using labs and allows practices to actually help customers embrace new culture and change. How they actually operate has actually helped us take those practices and bring it into our programs and kind of drive that to our customers. So we actually run our automation adoption program and the journey for customers through those practices that we actually learned in open innovation loves like open practice, library, even storming priority sliders and all of those modern techniques. So the goal is to help our customers understand those practices and actually embrace them and bring them into the organization to drive the change that that's looking for within the organization. >>A. J. Is there anything particular for those adoption practices when you're talking about Cloud? Because the communication amongst teams silos, you know, making things simpler is something that we absolutely do need for cloud. So I'm just curious how you connect kind of the cloud journey with the automation journey. >>So all of the journey program that actually created, whether it's a contender adoption program or the automation adoption program, we actually followed the same practices. So whether you're actually focused on a specific automation to, like, answerable or actually embarking on hybrid multicolored journey. We actually use the same practices so the customers don't have toe learn new things every time you have to go from one product, one of the so that actually brings a consistent experience to customers in driving change within the organization. So let's picture whether it is focusing automation focused on cloud migrating to the cloud. The practices remained the same, and the focus is about not trying to boil the ocean on day one. Try to break it into manageable chunks that give it a gun back to the business quickly learned from the mistakes that you make in each of the way and actually build upon it and actually be successful. >>So, Walter, I always love when we get to talk to the people that are working straight with customers because you come here to the conference, it's like, Oh, it's really easy Get started. It doesn't matter what role or what team you're in. Everybody could be part of it. But when you get to the actual customers, they're stumbling blocks. You know what are some of those things? What are some of the key things that stop people from taking advantage of all the wonderful things that all the users here are doing >>well. One of the things that I've identified and we've identified as a team is a lot of organizations always want to blow the ocean. And when and when it comes down to automation, they feel that if they are not doing this grand transformation and doing this this huge project, then they're not doing automation. And the reality is is that we're Trent with showing them that you can break things up into smaller chunks, as Visi alluded to. And even if you fail, you fail fast and you can start over again because you're dealing with things in a smaller chunk. And we've also noticed that by doing that, we're able to show them to return on investment faster so they can show their leadership, and their leadership can stand behind that and want to doom. Or so that's one of the areas. And then I kind of alluded to the other area, which is you have to have everybody involved. You want just subject matter experts riding content to do the automation. You don't want that just being one silo team. You want to have everybody involved and collaborate as much as possible. >>Maybe can you give us an example? Is about the r A y How fast to people get the results and, you know, prove toe scale this out. >>So with the automation adoption journey, what we're able to do is is that we come in and sit down with our customers and walk them through how to properly document their use cases. What the dependencies, What integration points, possibly even determining what is that? All right, ranking for that use case. And then we move them very quickly in the next increment. And in the next increment, we actually step them through, taking those use cases, breaking them down into minimum viable products and then actually putting those in place. So within a 90 day or maybe a little bit more than a little bit more than the 90 day window, were able to show the customer in many different parts of the organization how they're able to take advantage of automation and how the return on investment with hopes of obviously reducing either man hours or being able to handle something that is no a mundane task that you had to do manually over and over again. >>What are some of the things that people get confused about when they look at the breath of what's going on with the automation platform? When I see tool to platform, transitions are natural. We've seen that many times in the industry that you guys have had product success, got great community, that customers, they're active. And now you've got an ecosystem developing so kind of things air popping on all cylinders here. >>So the biggest challenge that we're actually being seeing customers is they actually now come to realize that it's very difficult to change the culture of the organization right there, actually embarking on this journey and the biggest confusion that is, how do we actually go make those changes? How do we bring some of the open practice some of the open source collaboration that Riddle had into the organization so they actually can operate in a more open source, collaborative way, and what we have actually learned is we actually have what we call its communities of practice within Red Hack. It is actually community off consultants, engineers and business owners. The actual collaborate and work together on offering the solutions to the market. So we're taking those experiences back to our customers and enabling them to create those communities of practice and automation community that everybody can be a part off. They can share experiences and actually learn from each other much easier than kind of being a fly on the wall or kind of throwing something or defense to see what sticks and what does not. >>What's interesting about the boiling the ocean comment you mentioned Walter and B J is your point. There is, is that the boil? The ocean is very aspirational. We need change rights. That's more of the thing outcome that they're looking for. But to get there is really about taking those first steps, and the folks on the front lines have you their applications. They're trying to solve or manage. Getting those winds is key. So one of things that I'm interested in is the analytics piece showing the victory so in the winds early is super important because that kind of shows the road map of what the outcome may look like versus the throw the kitchen, sink at it and, you know, boil the ocean of which we know to the failed strategy. Take us through those analytics. What are some of the things that people tend to knock down first? What are some of the analytical points that people look at for KP eyes? Can you share some insight into that? >>Sure, sure. So we always encourage our customers to go after the platform first. And I know that may sound the obvious, but the platform is something that is pretty straightforward. Every organization has it. Every organization struggles with provisioning, whether of a private cloud, public cloud, virtualization, you name it. So we have the customer kind of go after the platform first and look at some of their day to operations. And we're finding that that's where the heaviest return on investment really sits. And then once you get past that, we can start looking like in the end, work flows. You know, can they tie service now to tower, to be able to make a complete work flow of someone that's maybe requesting a BM, and they can actually go through that whole workflow by by leveraging tower and integration point like service. Now those air where we're finding that the operators of these systems going getting the fastest benefit. And it also, of course, benefits the business at the end of the day because they get what they need a lot fast. >>It's like a best practice and for you guys, you've seen that? Yes, sir. Docked with that out of E. J. What's your comment on all this? >>So going back to the question on metrics Automation is great, but it does not provide anybody to the business under the actually show. What was the impact, whether it's from a people standpoint, cost standpoint or anything else. So what we try to drive is enable customers. You can't build the baseline off where they are today, and as they're going through the incremental journey towards automation, measure the success of that automation against the baseline. And that actually adds the other way back to the customer. As a business you didn't get to see. I was creating a storage land. I was doing it probably 15 times a month. Take it or really even automated. It spend like a day created a playbook. I'll save myself probably half, of course, and that could be doing something that's better. So building those metrics and with the automation analytics that actually came in the platform trying those bass lines. So the number of executions, actually the huge value they'll actually be ableto realize the benefits of automation and measure the success off within enterprise. >>So I'm a customer prospect, like I want to get a win. I don't want to get fired. I won't get promoted. Right, I say, Okay, I gotta get a baseline and knock down some playbooks. Knock that down first. That what you're gonna getting it. That's a good starting. >>Starting. Understand your baseline today. Plan your backlog as to what you want to knock down. And once you know them down, build a dashboard as to what the benefits were, what the impact was actually built upon it. You actually will see an incremental growth in your success with automation. >>And then you go to the workflow and too, and that's your selling point for the next level. Absolutely good playbook. Is that the automation programs that in a nutshell or is that more of a best practice >>those components of the ah, the automation adoption journey that we allow the customer to kind of decide how they want their journey to be crafted. Of course, we have a very specific way of going about and walking them through it. But we allowed in the kind of crap that journey and that is those the two components that make up the automation. >>We're gonna put you guys on the spot with the tough question We heard from G. P. Morgan yesterday on the Kino, which I thought was very compelling. You know, days, hours, two minutes. All this is great stuff. It's real impact. Other customers validate that. So, congratulations. Can you guys share any anecdotal stories? You know, the name customers? Just about situations Where customs gone from this to this old way, new way and throw some numbers around Shearson Samantha >>is not a public reference, but I like to give you a customer. Exactly. Retail company. When we first actually went and ran a discovery session, it took them 72 days to approach in an instance. And the whole point was not because it took that long. It because every task haven't s l. A We're actually wait for the Acela manually. Go do that. We actually went in >>with our 72 hours, two days, two days, >>actually, going with the automation? We Actually, it was everybody was working on the S L. A. We actually brought it down to less than a day. So you just gave the developers looking to code 71 days back for him to start writing code. So that's the impact that we see automation bringing back to the customers, right? And you'll probably find the use causes across everywhere. Whether J. P. Morgan Chase you actually had the British Army and everyone here on states talking about it. It is powerful, but it is powerful relief you can measure and learn from it >>as the baseline point. Get some other examples because that's that's, uh, that's 70 days is that mostly delay its bureaucracy. It's It's so much time. >>It's manual past and many of the manual tasks that actually waiting for a person to do the task >>waterfall past things sound, although any examples you can >>yes, so the one example that always stands out to me and again, it's a pretty interviewing straight forward. Is Citrix patching? So we work with the organization. They were energy company, and they wanted to automate patching their searches environment, patching this citrus environment took six weekends and it took at least five or six engineers. And we're talking about in bringing an application owners, the folks who are handling the bare metal, all all that whole window. And by automating most of the patching process, we were able to bring it down to one weekend in one engineer who could do it from home and basically monitor the process instead of having to be interactive and active with it. And to me, that that was a huge win. Even though it's, you know, it's such dispatching. >>That's the marketing plan. Get your weekends back. Absolutely awesome. Shrimp on the barbecue, You know, Absolutely great job, guys. Thanks for the insight. Thanks. Come on. The key. Really appreciate it. Congratulations. Thank you. Thanks for sharing this queue here. Live coverage. Danceable fest. Where the big news is the ass. Full automation platform. Breaking it down here on the Q. I'm John. First to Minutemen. We're back with more coverage after this short break

>>live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the Q covering answerable Best 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat >>Hey, welcome back, everyone. This is the Cubes. Live coverage here in Atlanta, Georgia, for Ansel Fast, part of Red Hats Annual event with their customers, their community. I'm Chon hurry with the Cuban stupid men. My co host. Our next guest is Jason Smith, vice president. North America Service is for Red Hat. Jason, welcome to the Cube. >>Thanks. Thanks for having me. >>So mostly the service is wrapped around this or huge opportunity because of the impact that the automation is having the tasks people's jobs shift on the things they can do, more things. That service is opportunity, bigot. You just take us through kind of your strategy of how you look at answerable in context of the red hat portfolio. >>Sure, yeah. So from the service's perspective, we're really responsible for ensuring customer success and sex successful adoption of all of our technologies. So across the entire portfolio and so as opposed to a service. This company that's focused on surfaces were really focused on driving customers success and making sure that customers were successful so overall, from the service's perspective we have obviously are consulting, which really focused on working with customers. Implement solutions around red technology is expanding the use of redhead technologies. We have our training business, which is our education and certification business, which has on sites, open enrollment. But also over the last couple years we released our Red Hat Learning subscription, which is basically gives customers access to the entire portfolio of training on demand in the self paced way, which is been really fast growing part of our business. And then I think we've talked to you a little bit about this before, which is our open innovation labs, which is really focused on people in process and helping customers go through that digital transformation type of journey and focus around culture and things like that. >>It's interesting you look at the interviews we had yesterday with some of your customers. It's actually have a couple different profiles. You have the man. We nailed it. Now I gotta bring us across the entire organization, get a champion driving change. Other groups are standardized with that substrate for answerable. Others were like, Wow, I have other stuff. I need to really figure this out, take us through how you guys would approach those use cases because they're different. But all would want more. Service is some to accelerate either, say a champion, some to get a new prospect on board. >>Right? So, um, we've laid out We'll release is about 90 days ago, which is called Dark Automation Adoption Journey. And this is a five phased approach where we've worked with customers hundreds of customers around the world, in every phase of adoption of automation, obviously specifically around answerable. And this really looks at helping customers go from more of a tactical strategy, typically is what we're seeing today. A lot of customers have and school in different pockets, doing a lot of tactical things that are driving a lot of value. But how do you take that? And then really get two more of an enterprise strategy? So that's really what we've focused on taking what we've learned with customers at all of those phases and really taking those best practices and coming up with a standardized approach that we can really work with customers to be ableto get through that journey with him. >>Jason could bring us inside the customer base a little here. You know, what we hear is it's really easy to get started. But when you lay out those five steps is everybody looking to get to st five? Is that a, you know, year journey? Are some people okay? Just being at phase two or three. Help us understand a little bit, Kind of. And we know it varies greatly, but some of the characteristics as toe how fast they move along where the end journey is for most organizations, >>right. So as I mentioned this, customers are coming in. Some have been early adopters of answerable for a long time. So we've been working at more of a department departmental level with customers where they're driving value at that departmental level. Others were kind of coming to us for the first time, saying we're hearing all about this automation stuff. We know we need it, but we need to get started. And so we're really looking at, um, kind of starting out. We typically start with the Discovery session, and so we're bringing in our architects and consultants to come in and meet with their business and technical stakeholders to really understand where they are in that journey and really defined kind of their goals and objectives. So every customer is different, so really understanding what their goals and priorities are and then being able to help kind of craft that road map with, um to get through that journey. But I'd say most of our customers looking to figure out how to take it from kind of more of those tactical implementations to how do we leverage that in a more scalable, consistent way and be able to manage it more across the enterprise? >>Well, it's a direct software development often is different at different, different parts in an organization. If you look a kind of a dev ops movement, it's, you know, trying to get a little bit consistency across those, and it sounds like answerable plays well, toe help get collaboration and you know those playbooks that could be used across and know that I have something that is supported and works, and my organization buys into it >>exactly. So a lot of customers air doing great things in those pockets. But like you said, how do you take those and not reinvent the wheel every time but take them and kind of break them down into consumable chunks, kind of validate those and then publish them. So you have a standard set of playbooks that people can use and reuse versus developing them again for the first time. Because we know that answerable. You can do things quickly, but you don't want to redo them 10 different ways to do the same thing. So having that kind of blessed standardized way and then publishing them out managing them is really important. >>Great feedback from customers on that two on. Then they get more playbooks to get more. I gotta manage that. But one of the interesting things we talked about yesterday with Stephanie Cheers with on the rail side was connecting, answerable to rail the insights. Was the analytics certainly compelling? A lot of benefits scare coming into the rest of red hat. Well, where is that opportunity? How do you guys servicing those pieces? >>Yes, so we're really looking at answerable to be part of most of the red hat portfolio. So as we're working with customers and they're adopting more and more of the Red Hat technologies, answerable becomes a bigger part of that. So whether it's kind of bringing in our training to help train and enable customer associates on using answerable not only for automation but whether you're a real admin or open shift, or no matter what kind of product you're using, being ableto have the training enablement and service is around that to help everyone learn to understand how to use an school in leverage danceable across any area of the plot. >>You guys aren't new to platforms. Answer would have been a great product. Now the platform approach, any things you guys are gonna do different is going to the same Red Hat playbook dealing with other platforms like Open shift in other things. You guys been successful with similar playbook for you guys, or what's the? Is there a nuance with the platform of sensible automation? Ours business as usual? >>Yes. From the service's perspective, we've tried to really standardize on a set of offerings, um, and leverage kind of a consistent approach, whether it's with open shift for helping customers adopt containers or helping customers build a hybrid cloud. Or we've even got a adoption journey around huts for Tokyo's the leverage to create an NFI architecture. It's the same kind of process and framework. So we try to build a standardized process and no matter kind of what type of solution customers air building We look to follow those types of >>dreams. Nice glue layer kind of fits everywhere on a personal question for you. What's the show been like here for you share with the people watching who weren't here? Why is this year important? This seems to be an inflection point for answerable fest, the vibe, the number of attendees, the moment in history where the cloud journey on premises What's What's your take on? This is your personal view. It's >>been great. I mean, I think just the size talking a lot of people that have been coming here for many, many years, even prior to the redhead acquisition of Answerable. This is really community driven event, and it's still set up like a community driven event. You won't see a big red hat stuff everywhere. It's really kind of by the community for the community. And just to see the sheer size of on the number of attendees here, and really kind of the evolution of what customers are being able to talk about on stage with a value they're getting out of answerable is pretty tremendous. So just seeing the pure return on investment of leveraging, answerable and looking at all of the large customers they're here, speaking even on the panel last night was really incredible to see them talk about their journeys over the last couple of years, going from just starting to be work with, answerable to really kind of driving that across the enterprise and getting continually >>local on feedback. But they're also vocal on success. They have all these building in champions inside your inside the customer base, >>and they're all very, very excited about when you have excited customers. >>So, Jason, I'm wonder if you could help us connect the dots with how automation ties into the other journeys customers are going through. You know, the digital transformation, modernizing their applications, changing their hybrid and cloud hybrid and multi cloud environment. What's the role of automation to, you know, enable that and participate in those journeys? >>Yes, it's and it really has kind of a part in all of those journeys. So we work with lots of large customers that are going through a kind of different parts of those different journeys, and it seems like ants will becomes a part of it. And so, for instance, one of our customers that working we're working with right now through a large digital transformation, kind of across the entire enterprise from a both people process and technology perspective on this is leveraging things like open shift and modernizing all of their applications and breaking down things in the micro Service's and really transforming their business. But part of that is leveraging, answerable. And so one of the CEOs mottoes was, If we do something more than twice, we're gonna automate it. And so I hear that kind of over and over again, no matter what type of customer we're working with, no matter what type of kind of solution we're implementing, they're coming up with these monsters that they get really excited about around automation. Um, so we're not going to do things the old way with these new projects. We wanna automate everything, and I just seeing a ton of value and efficiency out of it. >>Awesome. What's the biggest surprise that you've seen over the past year on the service aside and just in terms of enterprise readiness Enterprise and appetite. Adoption, Any observations you could share around what's going on with automation, Observe, ability, a big part of the business. We're seeing that, too. Automation Observe ability to hot new sectors. Just exploding opportunity. >>Yeah, I think just continuing to see this kind of digital transformation effort across so many different customers and get everybody's really focused on not only the technology and the technology, especially things like open shift in Ansel and Rail. They're enabling all of this change in all of this movement to the cloud and the automation, but really working with customers to focus on the people in process so they can leverage those capabilities because just adopting the platforms doesn't give you all of the benefits without changing your people in process. So we spent a lot of time talking about really around the culture, and customers are looking at us saying Red Hat Service's Don't just come in with the technical experts would help us really understand how we transform our people in process along the way to really take advantage of the innovation that's going around right now with the cloud. >>So, Jason, uh, IBM Zach Wizard Read had been very clear keeping the brand, the products, the people of Red Hat. IBM knows a thing or two about service is though we think that, you know, service is really are the main focus that that will happen there. So give us a little insight as to how the scale of IBM will increase what redhead service is able to be able to dio. >>Yeah, So it's great for Red Hat, right? Because we now have a company the size of IBM out driving the adoption of our technologies. So everything that we're able to dio to date from a red hat perspective got us to one level of scale. But IBM is gonna take us to that next level of scale. And from a service's perspective, IBM already has service's departments around all of their different technologies. And so we really are gonna be treated kind of service department. So we're gonna continue to be the experts around Red Hat Technologies. But it really doesn't change that much for us because we worked with large s eyes. Um, since the time we started here and were always part of a lot of largess, I implementations so although IBM will be a very important partner of ours. They won't be on. The other part of the only partner will still work with all >>the flights. IBM That's right. And so we worked at >>IBM before the acquisition as a partner will work with him after the acquisition. But IBM What will change is on the IBM side, they will be building much larger delivery organizations around Red Hat Technologies, which will allow us to kind of get the the customer started on that journey. But when they look to really scale out than IBM can take in and kind of take that to the next level, that we would never have the scale to be able to get to that side. So it's good for us. It's good for our customers, and it's good for red hat driving adoption. >>Jim pointed this out on the many times on multiple calls around the broad portfolio. You guys have an IBM. They have somewhere broad portfolio. Thanks for coming on, sharing your insights. What's new for you? Take a quick minute to plug in what's going on your organization and what you're up to? >>Yes, So we're just continuing to scale. So, um The good news is IBM has a large service's organization, but that also drives a lot of demand for us. So we're continuing to scale, will continue to improve. Our offerings were continuing to help our customers reach those goals, moving to the cloud and everything they're looking to try to accomplish. >>Great. Thanks for coming. I appreciate it to Cuba. Coverage here. Danceable fast. I'm John for a student. Stay with us. More day, too. Live coverage after this short break.

>>live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the Q covering answerable best 2019. Brought to you by Red hat. >>Hey, welcome back to the Cuban Live coverage in simple fest. Two days of coverage. Day one, wrapping up. I'm John forwards. Accused Too many men. My guest co host today, our next two guests at his van. Van Velzen. Okay, welcome to the Cube. You're an engineer at I n G Bank and Robert de Bock, product owner, engineer I n g. Bank. Hey, guys, Thanks for coming on. Thank you. Have the practitioner on. Well, first of all, we have a lot of great feedback from the practitioners here. And also people in deploying answerable and other other cool Dev ops Tools on automation is at the top of the list. Yes, More efficient. Getting things done. Focus. You got satisfaction in job because things go awaiting time savings. I'm saving security drives a conversation and re skilling opportunities. Love. These are cutting edge. Things you got to do is take a minute to explain what you guys do. What a night. What a night. Angie bank. >>Yeah. I work in a team that provides redhead images for other teams. in 90 to consume to use two insane she ate way. Also live from playbooks, amendable code and rolls to manage those things. And he's very scattered, which sort of decentralized, which is a good thing. In my opinion, it's ready for scaling. In that case, I used to work with Dennis are lots in the tower team, so take it away. >>Okay, so I still work at the answer, built our squad What we do, it's ah, We make sure that the instable tower service keeps running 24 7 and we also ensure that we, uh, provide updates next to all this. We also have unanswerable community where we basically support our end users, which are their love. So, uh, from some numbers, I heard we have 1200 applications teams that are using our service. Um, and they all have, like, answerable playbook, sensible rolls, questions, difficulties with, uh, with anything. And we're basically there to support them as well. >>So 1200 teams are using answerable, Yes, inside the bank. Yes. Yeah, like >>it's set up very decentralized. And I think what I hear from instable fest that is not very common. I still think it's very good thing to do. We try to basically give these teams all the tools they need to do their stuff on. What I hear hear mostly is that there's essential team off administrators pushing the buttons for them. Towers. Great answer was great in that case, I think, for our case is really it's a perfect fit. >>E guess help Explain. Is this do you provide? You know, he said it's not centralized, but is this you know, here's best practices here. Some play boat out. How do you end? You support them? Because they're a little bit those relationships. >>Okay. Okay. Um so what we do is we basically all the rules and get ah ah, good lap. So it's an own premise. Get environment. You can search in this. Get for rules. Uh, not like all rules are easily to be found when searching for them. So that's why there are these communities to share what you have made. Um, >>plus these teams, they can themselves pick and choose. Some will try to rewrite everything That's fine. Others can can benefit from existing coat, so it's just a good trick. Thio enable these team to participate on it really different. Some people make it all themselves another >>next to this. So we basically have these 12 on the teams do their own thing. But next to this, we also have a self service portal where they can choose, like from, uh, generic finks like us. But your machine at new disc. So New capacity Cp use memory. That's all being done through a portal s so they don't need to do anything on their own for this they can, but most of them choose the easy way off using this portal. This portal basically doesn't a vehicle to instable tower, which executes a sensible playbook and some other stuffs. Maybe some AP eyes. And this is one of the things you guys create A manage these books. So, um >>and if you go back in time so the alternative way, which we happily got rid off, is to do it ourselves. I think it was before we we work together. Way had batch weekends, for example, and it >>was no very different. No life. Oh, that's working on weekends, >>weekends and, for example, he used to patch machine some 10,000 or so, and we were not aware what was important. What? Not so you you'd stop the whole pitch. Oh, this machine has a problem. Let's stop everything in focus and that's >>not important. Was like a complete order. >>And the other way around Also this machine. I guess it's not that important. Let's just >>continue this >>Sunday morning. Oh, my God. Everything's broken. >>Can you give us a little flavor of kind of the spectrum of solutions that you leverage answerable on >>tap? Yeah. We, uh I think what we see Moses for Lennox machines, eso fetching is a big one. We got a second operation, so there's a few of them. The deployment also depends on and small. So if you order a new machine, answer was involved somewhere to do to make it happen on network on board and the Windows teams are very interested. I'm not sure if we notice on board yet. To >>be honest, I know we did some book in the boss so a couple of months ago, using wind around when you needed set on policies there, But you can see that the networking teams were getting more momentum. Uh, five. There's some suffer suffer to find switches Bob. I don't know. The, uh Never mind the name, but ah, you can see some momentum in the in the networking. Uh, it's not Morgan departments >>configuration network networking with the activists. So that's where the action is in the >>network. Um, there were some cool talks also here on five workshops. So you can see there is, um, that there is some attention on these modules and integrations as well. >>What's your guy's goal here for the show? What brought you here? I'll see Big user. >>Yeah. So what do you think was like sharing our own thing? We did. They talk this morning. Ah, regarding and programming A really cool we wanted to share. It is this behavioral thing, and and >>we'll talk about take a minute and programming. >>So, um, basically, it's, ah programming with the whole team and making sure that you get something done with all the knowledge in the team. So you don't have to align off the words or if some other if you're Kulik says from basically session, you can do better using this staying. It's all, um it's It's all done during the decision >>as basically a good way to get a team up to speed. So in a team that's probably a few few people that are very quick and understand the concept and few starters or so So >>you guys decentralized, which makes sense for scale. I get that. So this sounds like you can operate decentralized, but where danceable. You can still have that common a book Switch >>teams, for example. So it used to be very specific. H team would have their own type of coat. Now that more answers used people can switch a little easier to to another product of surface because the languages have lied, shared, steal it, steal. It's quite >>well happy with this, right? I am. I really, really have to work on the weekend. That's good. I think >>the good thing is that you have one generic way of working. So his playbook is readable by all engineers. And if you want to learn this thing, you just do the inevitable course. So you know what this thing is? A mosque and roll, and it's all like >>way. We do see horrible >>koto. Come on, don't throw your college under the bus. But here's the international tough question can see is what we have been here. I want you guys to test this. We hear that there's a lot of time savings involved. Yes, with answer. True or false. That's true order of magnitude. What? What kind of saving way talking about? I >>think it depends on the thing because we saw a huge I don't know, except numbers. But this this os patching that Really? Really Uh, >>yes. Now, especially waas. Two people working a full time basically collecting, who needs to do what? The win. And then for a weekend, 10 15 people or so. So, uh, that's reduced now to sort of nothing. Yes, some maintenance to that playbook and roll. But I mean, yeah, it's difficult to express what message? So >>no one's getting phone call? Hey, come in on the weekend. So 15 people on the weekend jam and then to Fulton will just managing it all Go away. >>Yeah, not needed, but not needed. But they basically they can do something else, so those people are still there. But now they're not doing Os patching and doing all the excel sheets and keeping order off. The systems are important, and this shall be the first, and then they because way are basically doing the thing they know better. This application team knows their dependency, so they know they. But first I need to patch the database machine and then there during the front end or Andi. It's difficult to do this so they do it themselves. >>That's Dev Ops. That's that's the way it's supposed to be, right? >>So you've matured this thes deployments over time. As you look back, What key learnings do you have that maybe you'd recommend to your peers toe? You know how things could run a little bit smoother >>next time, a good amount of time. So they're stools. That's not the problem, So answer is great, but there's others to their great Give it time to sink in with the people. So you start something and you have to have a pretty strong team to do the long the long stretch with it and give it some time, maybe a year or so before everyone's on board it. In our case, in the beginning, we spend lots of time on this community model where we basically organized small meet ups or get together, too, show things or to hear problems and try to express them. That really helped a lot. And by now it's starting to get normal, more normal. So all the teams do sensible, basically. And problem starts slowly disappearing. Also. So So >>one of the things, um, that will be better. Probably in our scenario. Housekeeping metrics. So what are the improvements over time? I don't know how to measure this. No, no, no aspect. But it will be better if you had, like, better numbers like we did hair Very good. Or this is something like, what did the community thing bring way indirectly what the results are Because the engineers are doing things really, really things. They're really patching the replication. And they're really, um, restarting their own machines, for example, when there is something wrong. Whatever. Um, but our days related to our community thing or all that's really related to Sensible Tower >>last. I think we we are very technical focus. So So we like it as a nerd, so to say, to do things but what the business value is, for example, I'm not so interested or less interested so way typically, like the technology, so it could be good to have some someone onboard and your team that says, Yeah, but this is the problem. It's crossed. This amount of money and that solved now are improved. >>Well, they assume the applications are doing a good job. So you guys helped those guys out. They get to do their own thing. They do the heavy lifting. They're doing the coding anyway for those guys that were coming in managing full time on the 15 or so on the weekend. What are they doing now? >>Most are spread across. All the application teams go back. But the other side there is now it's our team that was not there s. So that's the price you have to pay. And that's a serious team. I mean, it's far six people now 86 people and 100 machines or so. So it is a serious amount of time, but it makes it at least much more constant. So people are not surprised by machines being patched, and Monday they come back into the half broken or so. So it's a lot more control now, so I don't know if you can express it in price, but at least it's more stable >>more consistent. >>Well, one of the things that we hear here and I want to get your thoughts as we wrap up is as you go forward, you got answerable 1200 teams using it. You got a lot of collaboration. The work cultures change. Sounds like a shower. Team steps service everything else. So some scale building out what's next? Because as it becomes a platform. Okay, you have to enable something. There has value there. Okay, technical nerd value and then business value >>scaling, uh, because we continuously see this thing growing like more application teams are adapting answerable, invincible tower. So, um, right now we have, like, a cluster. We have different clusters running. Go into much detail, but we can see that the load is getting higher and higher, so we need to skill. Um, and this is sort of difficult, but red. That is really supporting in this because they're going to change some things at the application level two to allow scaling even better. Um, >>plus, also, for most teams, they're starting their configuration. Everything is coat process. They're not there yet. As soon as they discover the power of it, I'm sure that's being used a lot. A lot more. And plus, there's other countries that are going to be connected. So you have a lot of work >>because your engineering doing some getting down and dirty with the code, automating everything. >>Yeah. Yeah. So, um, what else do we >>Oh, what's the coolest thing you've done that you've automated? >>Uh >>uh, Pick your favorite. >>So but the child during Encircle Tower and with answerable, um, let me think about this. >>I I really like the patching that saved us so much work. And, uh, I think also one of the next goes to make much more simpler. So we as a company, we're complex and the people also like complexity. That's wrong. We should change >>that. Patching up our >>offense, Melissa Simplicity. So we should really use that. >>You don't want any open holes in the network housely and assistance >>about your previous question. Like I have sort of a finger and all these small things. So it's sort of what I did. It's more like an A team thing. We created the OS patch playbooks, the configure stuff, the second day offs. So we did this as a team >>like sports but the playbooks together run the play. Some defense on security >>and programming. So you're doing >>this as a team, which is very cool. Has a scoreboard look good? Winning? >>Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're looking at the graphite. Uh, it's girl. >>Final question. How you enjoying the show here? Having a good time? What's the vibe here? What's it like here? Share for the people who aren't here. What's going on? What's the vibe with >>a conversation? It's great. We went to some sessions yesterday really technical stuff with developers. And this was really amazing because you heard details that that are not in the India in the talks today and tomorrow. Um, yeah, it's great. It's great community. It's just I really I really enjoy it because you can. It's You can have, like one on one conversations go into depth. I was showing something I created, and this guy's we'll hold. This is really great in the It's cool. It's just if you it's really great. It's really >>cool. Really? Yeah, for me also, it feels like coming home, So I know these people and I think the first day, the collaboration day, what's it called and I'm not sure you community, that's it's great because it's been a bit rough and unpolished in today's more polished and more presented and prepared to, uh, both are great. >>Good. Give the hard feedback. >>Yeah, you meet all the people. So, for example, I used instable a lot, and then I'm getting up. I see all these names. Like, who would that be there walking here and shake hands like, Oh, that's >>why guys like your code looking good. Yeah. Looks good. A contributor. Summit contributed. Okay. Sorry. After it for >>anyone that goes to visit that day, too. That's just great. >>It's great to see people face to face that, you know, online for their digital identity or the code >>you can You can't complain about stuff out on. Do you know that you don't hurt them or something with just commenting on get like after this issue and this issue and this issue. Then you can see them in person. And then you >>him a high five assault, you know? Hey, >>it's really very cool. >>Guys. Great conversations were coming on cue. Thanks, Dennis. Appreciate Robert. Thanks for coming on. Skew coverage here Day one of two days of live coverage here inside the Cube here in Atlanta, Georgia for Ansel Fest is the cute I'm John 1st 2 minute. Thanks for watching.

>>live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the Q covering Answerable Fest 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >>Okay, welcome back. Everyone is the live Cube coverage for two days here in Atlanta, Georgia for instable fest. I'm John Furrier, My Coast stupid in with the Cube. Ted Julian, vice president, product management, formerly CEO. Resilient now part of an IBM company. Back to doing V P of product management. Again, you don't really ask. Welcome to welcome back to the Cube. Good to see you. It's a >>pleasure to be here. Thanks. >>So I see product management. Holistic thinking is the big discussion here. The thing that's coming out of this event is configuration management, a siloed point activity now, more of a platform. You're seeing more of a systems architecture thinking going into some of these platform discussion. Security certainly has been there. They're here now. A lot of pressure, the out of things built in with security but maintaining the onslaught of threats and landscape changes going on. That's what you do. >>It's rough out there. >>What what's going on? What are the key trends that customers should be aware of when thinking about configurations? Because automation can help. Yeah, maybe all use cases, but >>way need to do something and because customers definitely need help. The alerts that they're dealing with them both in the volume and the severity is like nothing we've ever seen before. At the same time we're talking about earlier, right, the regulatory impact also really big difference just in the last two or three years. Huge skills, gap shortage also a critical problem. People can't find enough people to do this work. That's very difficult to keep so clearly we need to do something different. And there's no doubt that orchestration and automation and configuration management, as a component of that is we've barely scratched the surface of the potential there. To help solve some of >>the open source is, is helping a lot of people now. Seeing the light first was cloud, the skeptics said. There's no security and cloud now. There is open source securities there, but still, proprietary systems have security. But the mayor may not be talented. Your point, so automation is an opportunity. How are companies dealing with the mishmash or the multi platform solutions that are out there >>at your right to ask the question it is driving, um, the problem in a big way. Years ago we tried this security automation within security, like in the early days of firewalls and the Web and stuff like that, and it didn't go well. Unintended consequences. But think two things have changed. The environments changed, which has raised the stakes for the need to be able to do this stuff to a whole different level. But at the same time, the technology matured enormously. There's been multiple platforms shifts since then, and so security teams. They're both kind of desperate for a better solution, but also better options now than they had before. And so it's for this reason that we're starting to see people adopt orchestration and automation now in a way that we didn't see in the last time around. >>But the thing is that we were hearing here is that people are trying to automate the same things and some of these holes in the infrastructure, whether it's an S three bucket, this is basic stuff. This is not rocket science. Yeah, so on these known use cases, this makes total sense that a playbook or automation could help kind of feel those holes. >>We talk about it as a journey, you know? And I don't think any two organizations journey is the same, nor does it really even need to be the same. So we've seen some customers, for example, take the approach of what's a high volume type of incident that we deal with. And if we could apply orchestration and automation, they were gonna get great our eye right? We see 4000 phishing attacks every month or what have you. And that's certainly one way to do it. Yeah, but those other times with one, >>though, I have to go >>into that point. There's other people that are like, you know, gathering forensics on an end point right now. Incredibly manual process. We need to be able to do that globally. Do we do it every day? No, we don't. But if we could automate that and get those results back in more like a couple hours, as opposed to two days, because the guy we need in Sweden is out of the office or whatever, that could mean the difference between ah, low level incident were able to contain and something that goes global. And so that's the use case we wanna chase, so I don't think there's a right or wrong answer. >>Depends on the environment. Ah, whole host of the whole thing about security is no general purpose software anymore. You have to really make it custom because every environments different. >>I mean, gosh, you guys Aaron Arcee, right? It's nuts. There's thousands of vendors. I mean, there's hundreds of vendors that are really products. They're not the features masquerading as products that are masquerading as companies. But there's a reason why that's been the case, and it's because the risk is so high. >>The desperation to >>yes, exactly good word choice. Yeah. >>So what? One of the things that reminded me of security is this morning hearing about, you know, J P. Morgan going through the transformation from the ticketing system. Tau wait to make a great case study two. I need to be able to automate things. So, you know, we know that response time is so critically important in the security area. So tell us how that meshes together from security and automation toe be able to response, and you know, whether it be patching or, you know, responding to an attack, >>there's huge opportunity gains there on. We've seen customers do some really remarkable things that start with what you're discussing, which is if we could automate that fishing process to a degree and we have 4000 of those a month and we're able to maybe shrink a response time by 80 some or more percent, which is what we've seen. That's a lot of savings right there. And you know, the meat and potatoes there is. You already have a fishing Neil Alias. Probably that that employees report those phishing attacks, too. But what if we just monitored that? We stripped those emails, stripped out the attachments, and we could automate all the manual grunt work that an analyst would otherwise do right? Is that and is there in execute a ble? Is that execute herbal? Unknown bad? What command and control servers is it talk to? Are those known bads those air 10 tabs That analyst could have opening their browser if we could automate all of that. So when they go into the case, it's all just sitting there for them. Huge time saver. >>It's the great proof point of the people plus machines. How do you make make sure that the people that when they get the information, they're not having to do too much grunt work. They get really focused on the things where their expertise in skill sets are needed, as opposed to just buried. You >>nailed it. I mean, automation is a great role to play, but it really is a subset of orchestration. It's when you can bring those two things together and really fuse the people process and technology via orchestration. That's when you get really game changing improvements. >>Talk about the relationship between you guys or silly, unanswerable. Where's the fit? What you guys doing together? Why year give a quick plug for what you working on? >>Yeah, absolutely. So just by working with customers, we kind of discovered that there was this growing groundswell of answerable use within our customer base. It was largely an I T, whereas that IBM resilient. We're selling mainly in a security. Um, and once we uncovered that were like, Oh my gosh, there's all these integrations that already exists. They're already using them for I t use cases on that side of the house, but a lot of the same work needs to be done as part of a security workflow. And so we built our integration where, literally you install that integration into resilient. And we have a visual workflow editor where you can define a sophisticated workflow. And what's that? Integration is in place. All of your instable integrations air there for you. You drag and drop them on near workflow. You can string them all together. I mean, it's really, really powerful. >>It's interesting. Stew and I and David Lattin Ovary Brother Q. Post. We got hundreds of events we see every conference. Everyone's going for the control plane layer. Don't control the data. I mean, it's aspiration, but it's You can't just say it. You gotta earn it. What's happening here is interesting in this country. Configuration management. Little sector is growing up because they control the plumbing, the control of the hardware, the piece parts right to the operating system. So the abstraction lee. It provides great value as it moves up the stack, no doubt, and this is where the impact is, and you guys are seeing it. So this dependency between or the interdependence between software glue that ties the core underpinnings together, whether it's observe ability data. It's not a silo, just context, which they're integrating together. This the collision course? Yeah. What's the impact gonna be here? What's your thesis on this? >>That's why there is such great synergy is because they are really were sort of the domain expertise Doreen experts on the security point of view and our ability to leverage that automation set of functions that answerable provides into this framework where you can define that workflow and all the rest that specific to some security use cases eyes just very, very complimentary to one another. >>This is a new kind of a 2.0 Kana infrastructure dynamic, where this enables program ability. Because if these are the control switch is on the gear and the equipment and the network routes, >>yeah, and where things get really interesting is when you do that in the context of ah, workflow and a case management system, which is part of what we provide, then you get a lot of really valuable metrics that are otherwise lost. If you're purely just at a point to point tool to to automation realm, and that allows you to look at organizational improvements because you're able to marry. Well, first of all, you can do things like better understand what kind of value those I t controls. Air providing you and the automation that you're able to deliver. But you can relate that to your people in your process as well. And so you can see, for example, that while we have two teams, they're doing that the ones in the day shift ones in the night shift. They have access to the same tool sets, but ones more effective than the other. First of all, you know that. But then, having known that you can now drill into that and figure out OK, why is the day shift better than the night shift? And you can say, Oh, well, they're doing things a little bit differently, maybe with how they're orchestrating this other team is, Or maybe they're not orchestrating it. All right? And you're having that. And then now you are able to knowledge share and, um improve that process to drive that continuous improvement. >>So this operational efficiency comes from breaking down these siloed exactly mentality data sets or staff? >>Yeah, and pairing. That was not just as I said, the IittIe automation aspect of weaken now do that 80% faster. But what about the people in the process aspect? We even bring that into the mix as well. You get that next limit layer of insight which kind of allows you to tap into another layer of productivity. >>So this is an alignment issue. This brings that back. The core cultural shift of Dev ups. This is the beginning of what operationalize ng Dev ops looks like. >>Yes. Yeah, >>people are working together. >>It's really, really well put. I mean, it gets back to how this question got started, which is what is this energy? And to me, this energy really is that you have these siloed all too often siloed functions of I t operations and security operations. And this integration between resilient and answerable is the glue that starts to pull those two things together to unlock everything we just talked about. >>Awesome. That's great. >>Yeah, well, you know, research has shown that you know, Dev Ops embracing, delivering and shipping code more frequently actually can improve security. Not You know what? We have to go through this separate process and slow everything down. So are you seeing what? What is that kind of end state organization look like? Oh, >>I mean, that's a huge transformation. And it's something that on the security field we've been struggling with for the longest time, because when we were in kind of a waterfall mode of sort of doing things I mean your timeframe of uncovering a security issue, addressing it in code code, getting deployed to a meaningful enough fashion and over a long enough time to get a benefit that could be years, right? But now that we're in this model, I mean, that could be so much, much more quickly obtained and obviously not only other great just General Roo I improvements that come from that, but your ability to shrink the threat window as a result of this as well as huge and that is crucial because all the same things that us, the good guys they're doing to be able to automate our defenses, the bad guys, they're doing the same thing in terms of how they're automating their attacks. And so we really have to. We have no choice. >>So, Ted, you were acquired by IBM. IBM made quite sizeable acquisition with Red Hat. Tell us what your IBM with danceable. How that should play out >>there is just enormous potential. And answerable is a big, big piece of it, without a doubt. And I think we're just scratching the tip of the iceberg for the benefits. They're just in the from resilience point of view. And, you know, we're not to stay in touch because we have some really interesting things coming down the pike in terms of next gen platforms and the role that that answer will complain those two and how those stretch across the security portfolio with an IBM more broadly and then even beyond that. >>Well, we want to keep in touch. We certainly have initiated Cube coverage this year on security. Cyber little bit going for a broader than the enterprise. Looking at the edge edges. You know about the perimeter. Being just disabled by this new service area takes one penetration lightbulb I p address. So again, organizing and configuring these policy based systems sounds like a configuration problem. Yeah, it is. This is where the software's gonna do it. Ted, Thanks for coming on. Sharing the insights. Any other updates on your front. What do you are most interested in what? Give us a quick update on what you're working on. >>Um, well, we're just getting started with the answerable stuff, so that's particularly notable here, but also kind of modern, modernizing our portfolio, and that really gets to the whole open shift side of the equation and the Red Hat acquisition as well, So not ready to announce anything yet. But some interesting things going on there that that kind of pull this all together and that serve as just one part of the foundation for the marriage between red at 9 p.m. and wanna sneak a value can bring the >>customers any sneak peek at all on the new direct. Sorry time. At least lips sink ships Don't do it. Love to no. >>Blame me for asking. >>Hey, I got a feeling hasn't automation. And somewhere in there Ted, thanks for sharing your insights. It was great to see Cuba coverage here. Danceable fest. I'm jumpers to minimum, breaking out all the action as this new automation feeds A I's gonna change the stack game as data is moving up to stack. This isn't Cube. Bring all the data will be back up to the short break. >>Um

>>Live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the cube covering Ansible Fest 2019. Brought to you by red hat. >>Welcome back. Everyone's cubes live covers here in Atlanta for Ansible Fest. Here's the cube covers. Have red hats event around automation for all. John Ford's do many men. Our next guest is Joe Fitzgerald, Cuba Lum, vice president, general manager of the management business unit at red hat. Great timing for Ansible. Great to have you back on the cube. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. And it's great to have you here at Ansible Fest. Super essential for camera timing about Ansible. Let's do an, I did our intro, uh, analysis and platformization of automation. Big, big move, big news. But there's a bigger trend at play here around automation. Why is the timing now for automation discussions with Ansible? So good. The demand for automation is so broad in enterprises, right? They're trying to do everything from, you know, dev ops, tool chains to IOT devices. >>I'm trying to deploy things faster, uh, you know, fix security vulnerabilities faster. It's all about speed, agility, efficiency. It all comes back to automation. And the news here is the general availability, although available in November as announced on keynote of the Ansible automation platform. So this is something that's been going on for a while and I suppose just been grown weighing now it's a platform. What's in the platform? Why is it important? Why should customers care? So, uh, you know, we've been on this journey with Ansible which started off as this incredibly simple, elegant architecture and a way to automate things. And what's happened over the past couple of years is it's exploded in terms of the number of people who are using it, the number of people who are generating automation integration. Um, and so in working with a lot of customers, right, what we saw the need for was really to help them collaborate and scale their automation efforts. >>Um, scale, you know, who could, you know, build, reuse, share, uh, score content and track it. Really important. So we put a lot of those efforts into the platform to take it to the next level. Really. You know, we've been talking about Ansible, gum stew, going back when you know, 2014 OpenStack, I think I remember we are first talking about the cube. It had a cult following when it emerged. You guys acquired it at what, the next year, 2015 roughly. Um, but Annabelle had this cult following of people who just loved to get into the configuration side of things, make them go better. You guys acquired it, done well with it, kept it going, get the community flywheel, keep rolling a lot of progress since then. So what are you most proud of? What's the most notable things? Oh, the growth of the Ansible journey. What's, what's the big story there? >>So, uh, it's almost four years since red hat acquired Ansible. And I remember when I proposed acquiring Ansible and swell was this small, you know, Eastern U S company with sort of a community cult following, but very small in terms of, you know, commercials and, and reach and stuff like that. Mostly focused on the configuration space. Like a lot of the other automation tools over the past four years. Probably the best thing we did that redhead is really good at is we let the community do what the community does best, right? The innovation, the number of contributors, the amount of Ansible integration modules, playbooks has exploded, right. Uh, if you were in the keynote this morning, um, it was number six on the, you know, repository list out of 100 million, you know, almost, you know, just a massive amount of projects and here it is at number six. >>So we didn't perturb the community, we actually helped it grow and we've been able to help the technology evolve from a config automation product and technology into this very broad spectrum. Now enterprise automation platform that crosses domains like, you know, networks and security and storage and cloud and windows. Just a phenomenal, uh, you know, growth in it. Yup. Show help. Explain how platform sets up Ansible for it future. They talked in the keynote a little bit about starting with some of the, uh, kinda core partners in the collections that they're offering. But in the future for a platform to really be a platform, it needs to be something that users themselves can build on top of. So, you know, help us understand where it is today. You know, when it first announced here for November, um, and where it shows shall be going in the future. >>So we didn't use the platform word lightly. Um, I think that, you know, platform has a set of connotations and, and it's sort of a set of requirements. What we saw was that different teams and groups inside organizations, we're bringing Ansible in and using the technology and having very good success in their particular area. Then what we saw was these teams were trying to share automation and collaborate across organizations. Then even in the community, there's tens of thousands of rolls and playbooks out there that the community has built. There might be 300 that do the same thing, which is the best one, which, which one are people using? Uh, you know, how successful is it? How long does it take? Um, what we found was that they needed a bunch of tools to be able to collaborate, track, uh, analytics about stuff so that they could share and collaborate at a higher scale. >>Yeah. I, that's one of the great value propositions when we talk about SAS is if it's done well, not only can I share internally, but I can learn from others that have used the platform and make it easier to take advantage of that. So is that part of that vision that you see with the platform? Yeah, so I mean, there's a couple different ways of sharing. If you're running a SAS service, then you know, a central person is coordinating the sharing and things like that. What we tried to do with the, with the Ansible platform is basically enabled the way that people can share content without having to go through a central, you know, agent, if you will. So we provide services and things to help them manage their, their content, you know, with uh, you know, uh, galaxy and collections and things like that. >>Um, it's all about organizing and being able to share content in a way, uh, to make them more efficient. Should I talk about the trends around, um, you've done it. First of all, you done a great job with Ann's book. Congratulations. Um, the big fan of that company and you guys did a good job of it. As it goes full, where you're thinking about cloud complexities as people start looking at the cloud equation, hybrid and cloud 2.0 and the enterprise complexity still is coming as more of it. How do you guys see that? How are you viewing that, um, that marketplace because it's not just one vertical, it's all categories. So how are you guys taking animal to the next level? How you guys look at that, managing those complexities that are around the corner? Yeah. So if you think about it, you know, everybody's moving towards a multi, multi hybrid cloud, you know, sort of configuration, right? >>Um, each one of these platforms and clouds has their own set of tools which work really well perhaps in their particular cloud or their silo or their environment. If you're an organization and you're running multi-cloud, you're responsible for automating things that might span these clouds. You don't want to have different silos of automation tools and teams that only work in one cloud or one environment. So the fact that Ansible can automate across these, both on premise and in the public clouds, multiple public clouds, across domains, network storage, compute, create accounts, uh, you know, do all sorts of things that you're gonna need to do. So it's one automation technology that will span the complexity of those environments. So it really, it's, I don't see how people are going to do it otherwise without fielding lots of people and lots of tools. You know, we were talking with Stephanie and Sue and I talked on our intro insights segment around the word scale has been kicked around, certainly is changing a lot of the landscape on how companies are modernizing the open source equation, but it's also changing the people equation. >>I want you to explain your vision on this because I think this is a key point that we're seeing in our community where people have told us that automation provides great efficiency, et cetera. Good security, but job satisfaction is a real big part of it. You know, people, it's a people challenge. This is about people, your view on scale and people. So organizations are under tremendous pressure right now to do more, right? Whether it's deploying new application faster to close security vulnerabilities faster, uh, to move things around to, to, to right size, you know, resources and applications and things like that. And you know, Ansible allows them to do that in a way where they can be much more efficient and be much more responsive to the business, right? Otherwise, you know, you see some of the customer testimonials here where the amount of time goes down from six hours to five minutes, the teams can be far more productive. >>Um, it, it really gives job satisfaction because they can do things that were almost impossible to automate before by using Ansible to automate network storage and compute in the same playbook. Before, those were three different tools or three teams and people of solving some of the same problems in different areas. And this is where playbooks can be a problem and an opportunity because we have too many playbooks, you have to know which playbook to be available. I mean you can almost have a playbook of playbooks and this is kind of a opportunity to use the sharing collaboration piece. What's your rich to thought on that as that playbook complexity comes in as more playbooks enter the organizations, you know, there's a lot of deployment of the same kind of stack or the same kind of configuration and things like that. So you know, it's really extending community beyond, you know, you know, working on code into working on content, right around automation. >>So if somebody wants to deploy engine X, I think there's over 300 different, you know, playbooks to deploy engine X, right? We don't want to have 5,000 playbooks to deploy engine X. Why can't there be a couple that people take and say, wow, this is perfect. I can tweak it from my organization, integrate my particular systems, and I can hit the ground running instead of trying to either start from a blank page or to go sift through hundreds of almost close, uh, you know, playbooks that do sort of the same thing a lot of times. David's big time. Enormous. Alright. >>So Joe, congratulations on the four years of just continued growth, you know, great momentum in the community wanting to touch on, you know, the, the, the big move, uh, you know, in the last year is, you know, IBM spending, you know, quite a few dollars to, to acquire red hat. What will this mean for kind of the reach and activity around Ansible in the community, the IBM acquisition. >>So IBM had been involved in Ansible in a number of their, you know, products, right? In terms of integration into Ansible. So they have teams and folks within IBM that obviously got Ansible all before the acquisition. Um, I think that it's, it's highly complimentary. IBM has very strong capabilities around management and monitoring, security and things like that. All of those things inevitably turn to automation. Right. Um, so I think it really, um, it only gives us access to IBM and, and they're sort of, you know, their their channel and their accounts in their, and their reach, but also their teams that have these, these sets of technologies, um, that are natural compliment, you know, whether it's Watson driving Ansible or security or network monitoring, driving Ansible automation. It's a really powerful combination. >>Yeah. I also just want to get your kind of macro level view on automation. I sat on a panel talking to CIS admins about careers and it was the number one thing that they felt they needed to embrace. We see like the RPA community probably in adjacency to what you see heavily pushing automation, uh, you know, help explain how important automation is and that it's not, you know, just a silver bullet also. >>Yeah. So, you know, a lot of times people are, you know, the, the sort of the easy, um, you know, description is automation's gonna eliminate jobs or things like that. I think it's more like sort of the power tool analogy. You know, you know, if you had a, you know, a hammer and a screwdriver before, now you've got a power screwdriver and a pneumatic hammer and uh, you know, all sorts of additional things. They're force multipliers for these people to do broader, bigger things faster, right? Um, and that's what every organization is driving them to do. How agile can you be our competition deployed something, how fast can we deploy it and how many, you know, new releases a week. Can we deploy, um, when security hits, you know, how fast can we close the vulnerabilities that hours, days, weeks, or can we do it in minutes? >>The old expression, if you, if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But if you're an agile, you can adjust to figure out the opportunity. It's kind of awesome kind of quote there. This speaks to the changes. I want to get your thoughts. Last question for you is, as someone who's been in the industry for awhile, we've first interviewed and I think 2014 at OpenStack when we first started chatting around the industry. So much has changed now more than ever. The modern enterprise is looking at cloud impact, operating as an operating model, cloud one, Datto, Amazon compute, storage standups software, and they're piece of cake startups. We're doing it now as enterprises really want to crack the code on cloud software automation. Observability these new categories are emerging, kind of speaks to this cloud 2.0, how would you describe that to folks if, if asked, what's the modern era enterprise cloud architecture look like? >>What is cloud 2.0, how would you take a stab at that definition? So I would say after all these years, cloud is really entering its infancy and what does that mean? We're just starting now to appreciate what can be built in cloud and we're going to get a big boost soon with five G, which is gonna, you know, increase the amount of data, the amount of, uh, you know, edge devices, uh, IOT and things like that. Um, the cloud is becoming, you know, the first choice for people when they build their architectures and their business. Um, it's gonna fundamentally change everything. So I think, you know, some people, what's the quote? You know, some people overestimate, you know, what the technology can do in the short term and underestimate what it can do in the longterm. We're now getting to that point where people are starting to build some really powerful cloud based applications. See this as a big wave then big time wave. Yeah. I mean, we had a quote still on the cube last week. Data is the new software, so software, abstractions, automation. This is the new way. I mean, it's a whole new architecture. So exciting. Thanks for coming on the cube. Appreciate juncture having thanks. We're here at the Asheville Fest, the Cuban Chalfont stupid men. Break it down. The analysis, getting into the automation for all conversation. Big category developing. We're covering it here. Live back more after this short break.