>>Good morning, everyone from Chicago Live. The Cube is live at Ansible Fast 2022. Lisa Martin and John Ferer are here for two days of multiple coverage on the cube. Very excited to be back in person. Ansible's 10th anniversary, the first in-person event. John, since 2019. Yeah, great to be perfect. One of the nuggets dropped this morning and I know you was Opss code. >>Yeah, we're gonna hear about that OPSIS code here in this segment. We're gonna get in, but the leader of the, the business unit at Ansible, part of Red Hat. So look forward >>To this. Exactly. Tom Anderson joins us, one of our alumni. Welcome back to the program. Thank you. The VP and general manager of Red Hat. First of all, how great is it to be back in person with live guests and an engaged audience and then robust community? >>It is amazing. It really is. I kind of question whether this day was ever gonna come again after three years of being apart, but to see the crowd here and to see, like you said, the energy in the room this morning and the keynotes, it's fantastic. So it's fa I just couldn't be happier. >>So opsis code nugget drop this morning. Yep. We wanna dissect that with you as, as that was mentioned in the keynote this morning. As Ansible is pushing into the cloud and and into the edge, what does OPSIS code mean for end users and how is it gonna help them to use a term that was used a lot in the keynote level up their automation? >>Yeah, so what we see is, look, the day zero, day one provisioning of infrastructure. There's lots of tools, there's lots of ways to do that. Again, it's just the company's ambition and dedication to doing it. The tools are there, they can do that. We see the next big opportunity for automation is in day two operations. And what's happening right now in ops is that you have multiple clouds, you've got multiple data centers and now you've got edge environments. The number of things to manage on a day-to-day basis is only increasing. The complexity is only increasing this idea of a couple years ago where we're gonna do shift everything left onto the developer. It's nice idea, but you still have to operate these environments on a day two basis. So we see this opportunity as opsis code, just like we did infrastructures code, just like we did configuration as code. We see the next frontier as operations code. >>Yeah, and this is really a big trend as you know with cube reporting a lot on the cloud native velocity of the modern application developer these days, they're under, they're, it's a great time to be a software developer because all the open source goodness is happening, but they're going faster. They want self-service, they want it built in secure, They need guardrails, they need, they need faster ops. So that seems to be the pressure point. Is ops as code going to be that solution? Because you have a lot of people talking about multi-cloud, multiple environments, which sounds great on paper, but when you try to execute it, Yeah, there's complexity. So you know, the goal of complexity management has really been one of the key things around ops. How do I keep speed up and how do I reduce the complexities? These are big. How does, how does ops code fit into that? >>Yeah, so look, we, we see Ansible as this common automation back plane, if you will, that goes across all of these environments. It provides a common abstraction layer so that whether you're running on Azure, whether you're a GCP or whether you're AWS or whether you're, you know, a PLC out on a shop industrial edge floor with a plc, each of those things need to be automated. If we can abstract that into a common automation language, then that allows these domain experts to be able to offer their services to developers in a way that promotes the acceleration, if you will, of those developers tasks. And that developer doesn't have to know about the underlying complexities of storage or database or cloud or edge. They can just do their >>Job. You know, Tom, one of the things I observed in Keynote, and it comes across every time I, we have an event and in person it's more amplified. Cause you see it, the loyalty of the customer base. You have great community. It's very not corporate like here. It's very no big flashy news. But there's some news, hard news, It's very community driven. Check the box there. So continuing on the roots, I wanna get your thoughts on how now the modern era we're in, in this world, the purchasing power, again, I mentioned multicloud looks good on paper, which every CX I wanna be multiple clouds. I want choice now. Now you talk to the people running things like, whoa, hold on, boss. Yeah, the bottoms up is big part of the selection process of how people select and buying consume technology with open source, you don't need to like do a full buy. You can use open source and then get Ansible. Yeah. This is gonna be a big part of how the future of buying product is and implementing it. So I think it's gonna be a groundswell, bottoms up market in this new cloud native with O in the ops world. What's your reaction to that? What's your thoughts? >>So here, here's my thoughts. The bulk of the people here are practitioners. They love Ansible, they use Ansible in their day to day job. It's how it helped, makes 'em successful. Almost every executive that I go out and talk to and our customers, they tell me one of their number one pro or their number one problem is attracting you talent and retaining the talent that they have. And so how can they do that? They can give them the tools to do their job, the tools that they actually like. So not a top down, you know, old fashioned systems management. You're gonna use this tool whether you like it or not. But that bottoms up swell of people adopting open source tools like Ansible to do their job and enjoy it. So I see it as a way of the bottoms up addressing the top down initiative of the organization, which is skills retention, skills enhancement. And that's what we focus on here at this event. Are the practitioners, >>Is that the biggest customer conversation topic these days? Is this the skills gap, retention, attraction talent? Would you say it's more expansive as the organizations are so different? >>Well, so a lot of the folks that I meet are, you know, maybe not sea level, but they're executives in the organization, right? So they're struggling with attract, you know, pretty much everywhere I go, I was in Europe this summer, conversation was always the same. We got two problems. Tracking people. We can't find people, people we find we can't afford. So we need to automate what they would do. And, and then the second piece is the complexity of our environment is growing, right? I'm being asked to do more and I can't find more people to do it. What's my solution? It's automation, you know, at the end of the day, that's what it comes down to. >>It's interesting, the people who are gonna be involved in the scaling horizontally with automation are gonna have the keys to the kingdom. The old joke when it was, you know, they run everything. They power the business now the business is digital. You gotta be hybrid. So we see hybrids a steady state right now, hybrid cloud. When you bring the edge into the equation, how do you see that developing? Because we think it's gonna be continually be hybrid and that's gonna extend out on the edge. What is the ansible's view on how the edge evolves? What's, what's going on there? Can you share your thoughts on the expansion to the edge? >>There's a, our experience is there's a rapid modernization happening out at the edge, industrial edge, you know, oil and gas platforms, retail locations, industrial floors, all that kind of stuff. We see this convergence of OT and IT happening right now where some of the disciplines that enterprises have used in the IT area are gonna expand out into ot. But some of the requirements of ot of not having skilled IT resources, you know, in the store, in the fast food restaurant, on the oil platform, needing to have the tools to be able to automate those changes remotely. We're seeing a real acceleration of that right now. And frankly, Ansible's playing a big role in that. And it's connecting a lot of the connective tissue is around network. What is the key piece that connects all of this environment as network and those number of endpoints that need to be managed. Ansible is, you know, >>It's way use case for Ansible because Ansible built their business on configuration automation, which was don't send someone out to that branch office back in the old days. Exactly. Do it. Manual versus automation. Hey, automation every time. Yes. This is at large scale. I mean the scale magnitude, can you scope the scale of what's different? I mean go even go back 10 years, okay, where we were and how we got here, where we are today. Scope the size of the scale that's happening here. >>You know, hundreds of thousands of endpoints and things. That's not even the API points, but that's the kind of compute points, the network points, the servers it's in. It's, it's, you know what we would've never thought, you know, 10 years ago, a thousand endpoints was a lot or 10,000 endpoints was a lot of things to manage when you start talking about network devices. Yeah, yeah. Home network devices for employees that are remote employees that need to be in a secured network. Just the order of magnitude, maybe two orders of magnitude larger than it has been in the past. And so again, coming home to the automation world, >>The world's spun in your front, your front door right now. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, >>Absolutely. Talk about, you talked about the acceleration. If we think of about the proliferation of, of devices online, especially the last two years, when, to your point, so many people shifted to remote and are still there. What are some of the, the changes in automation that we've seen as businesses have had to pivot and change so frequently and so many times to be successful? >>Yeah, so here's what we've seen, which is it's no longer acceptable for the owner of the network team or the ownership of the database or of the storage facility to, you can't wait for them to offer their service to people. Self-service is now the rule of thumb, right? So how can those infrastructure owners be able to offer their services to non IT people in a way that manages their compliance and makes them feel that they can get those resources without having to come and ask. And they do that by automating with Ansible and then offering those as package services out to their developers, to their QE teams, to their end users, to be able to consume and subscribe to that infrastructure knowing that they are the ones who are controlling how it's being provisioned, how it's being used. >>What are some of the, there were some great customers mentioned this morning in the keynote, but do you have a favorite example of a customer, regardless of industry that you think really shows the value and, and the evolution of the Ansible platform in its first 10 years and that really articulates the business value that automation delivers to a company? >>Yeah, no, it's a great question. I would think that, you know, if you wound the clock back 10 years, Ansible was all about server configuration management, right? That's what it was about was per provisioning, provisioning, you know, VMware infrastructure, vSphere, and then loading on VMs on top of that as it's expanded into network, into security and to storage and to database into cloud. It's become a much broader platform, if you will. And a good example is we have a customer, large oil and gas customer who is modernizing their oil platforms. I can imagine I not, I've not been on one, but I imagine the people that are out working on that oil platforms have greasy hands that are pushing on things. And they had this platform that the technology modernization included Azure. So connecting to data on Azure, rolling out new application updates, has to have a firewall, has to have network capabilities, has to have underlying OS to be able to do that. And Ansible was the glue that brought all that together to be able to modernize that oil platform. And so for me, that's the kind of thing where it sort of makes it real. You know, the actual businesses, >>The common set of services, this is, this is where we're seeing multi-cloud. Yeah. You start to have that conversation where, okay, I got this edge, it kind of looks the same, I gotta make it work. I'm a developer, I want some compute, I want to put this together. I have containers and orchestration behind it and kind of seeing the same kind of pattern. Yeah. Evolving at scale. So you guys have the platform, okay, I'm an open source. I love the open source. I got the platform 2.3, I see supply chain management in there. You got trusted signatures. That's a supply chain. We've been hearing a lot about security in the code. What else is in the platform that's updated? Can you share the, the, the new things that people should pay attention to in the platform? >>Yeah, we're gonna talk about a couple of things smaller around event driven Ansible, which is bringing Ansible into that really day two ops world where it's sort of hands free automation and, and, and operations where rather than someone pushing a button to trigger or initiate a piece of, of automation, an event will take place. I've detected an outta space condition, I've detected a security violation, I've detected something. Go to a rule book. That rule book will kick off in automation close that remediate that problem and close the thing without anyone ever having to do anything with that. So that's kind of one big area. And we're gonna talk tomorrow. We've got a real special announcement tomorrow with our friends from IBM research that I'm gonna, >>We'll have you on 10 30 Martha Calendars. >>But there's some really great stuff going on on the platform as we start to expand these use cases in multiple directions and how we take Ansible out to more and more people, automation out to more and more people from the inside, experts out to the consumers of automation, make it easier to create automation. >>Yeah. And one of the things I wanted to follow up on that and the skill gap, tying that together is you seeing heard in the keynote today around Stephanie was talking about enterprise architecture. It's not, I won't say corner case answer. I mean it's not one niche or narrow focus. Expanding the scope was mentioned by Katie, expand your scope grow, you got a lot of openings. People are hire now, Now Ansible is part of the enterprise architecture. It's not just one thing, it's, it's a complete, Explain what that means for the folks out there. Yeah. >>So when you start to connect what I call the technology domains, so the network team uses Ansible to automate their network infrastructure and configure all their systems. And the compute team uses it to deploy new servers on aws. And the security ops team use it to go out and gather facts when they have a threat detection happening and the storage team is using it to provision storage. When you start to then say, Okay, we have all these different domains and we want to connect those together into a set of workflows that goes across all of those domains. You have this common language and we're saying, okay, so it's not just the language, it's also the underlying platform that has to be scalable. It's gotta be secure. We talked about signing content. I mean, people don't understand the risk of an automation gone wild. You can, you can do a lot of damage to your infrastructure real fast with automation, just like you can do repair, right? So is what's running in my environment secure? Is it performant and is it scalable? I mean, those are the two, those are the three areas that we're really looking at with the platform right >>Now. Automation gone wild, it sounds like the next reality TV show. Yeah, I >>May, I may regret saying that. >>Sounds >>Like great. Especially on live tv. Great, >>Great podcast title right there. I made a mental note. Automation Gone Wild episode one. Here we are >>Talk about Ansible as is really being the, the catalyst to allow organizations to truly democratize automation. Okay. You, you talked about the different domains there and it seems to me like it's, it's positioned to really be the catalyst that's the driver of that democratization, which is where a lot of people wanna get to. >>Yeah. I mean for us, and you'll see in our sessions at Ansible Fest, we talk a lot about the culture, the culture of automation, right? And saying, okay, how do you include more and more people in your organization in this process? How can you get them to participate? So we talk about these ideas of communities of practice. So we bring the open source, the concepts of open source communities down into enterprises to build their own internal communities of practice around Ansible, where they're sharing best practices, skills, reusable content. That is one of the kind of key factors that we see as a success in inside organizations is the scales, is sort of bringing everybody into that culture of automation and not being afraid of automation saying, Look, it's not gonna take my job, it's gonna help me do my job better. >>Exactly. That automation argument always went, went to me crazy. Oh yeah, automating is gonna take my job away. You know, bank teller example, there's more bank tellers now than ever before. More atm. So the, the job shifts, I mean the value shifts. Yeah. This is kind of where the, where the automation helps. What's real quick, final minute we have left. Where does that value shift? I'm the person being automated away or job. Yeah. Where do you see the value job? Cause it's still tons of openings for people's skills, >>You know? So we see the shift from, particularly in operations from, here's my job, I look at a ticket queue, I grab a ticket, it's got a problem, I go look at a log, I look for a string and a log, I find out the air and I go, configuration change that. That's not a really, I wouldn't call that a fund existence for eight or 10 hours a day, but the idea, if I can use automation to do that for me and then focus on innovating, creating new capabilities in my environment, then you start to attract a new, you know, the next generation of operations people into a much more exciting role. >>Yeah. Architects too, they turned into architects that turned into the multiple jobs scope. It's like multi-tool player. It's like >>A, you know, Yeah, yeah. The five tool player, >>Five tool player in baseball is the best of the best. But, but kind of that's what's >>Happening. That's exactly what's happening, right? That's exactly what's happening. And it helps address that skills challenge. Yeah. And the talent challenge that organizations have as well. >>And everybody wants to be able to focus on delivering value to the organization. I have to get the end of the day. That's a human component that we all want. So it sounds like Ansible is well on its way to helping more and more organizations across industries achieve just that. Tom, it's great to have you back on the program. Sounds like you're coming back tomorrow, so we get day two of Tom. All right, excellent. Look forward to it. Congratulations on the first in-person event in three years and we look forward to talking to you >>Tomorrow. Thank you so much. >>All right, for our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube Live from Chicago, Day one of our coverage of Ansible Fest 2022. Stick around. John and I welcome back another Cube alumni next.