from San Francisco it's the queue covering Red Hat summit 2018 brought to you by Red Hat hey welcome back everyone live here in San Francisco California Moscone West is the cubes live coverage of Red Hat Summer 2018 I'm John furry and my co-host John Troyer our next guest is Denise Dumas vice president software engineering operating system group the Red Hat welcome back to the cube good to see you thank you so much great to be here with you so operating systems Linux the base base with everything yeah now you got all those other goodness going on you have some acquisitions permit bit we were just talking about before he came on a lot of action going on yeah what's new well you know you think that the world of operating systems would be boring but honest to god it is so not especially now right because there is a whole generation of change going on in the hardware and when the hardware changes the operating system has got to change to keep up right you look at the stuff that's going on with GPUs with FPGA right I mean and that's just like tip of the iceberg yeah and everything has to be programmable so you need software to keep track of it so it's not just the patches you gotta keep on top of the DevOps automations a big part of it and security models are changing with the cloud there's no perimeter so you have to have maybe chip level encryption os the way up this is challenging so what is it what's the impact to Red Hat as these new things come on because you know you got you know fishing out there sphere fishing is a big problem you got to handle it all how do you guys handle all the security challenges well you know it's it's actually interesting because rel is the base the core of Red Hat's product line which means that we provide the firm underpinning for everything else in the portfolio so we have the FIP certification we're doing the Common Criteria certification we provide the reliable crypto that everybody else can just expect to have in their world and we have to be the really firm basis for everything that layers on top and it's really great to have the additional products in the portfolio working very closely with us to make sure that we can be end-to-end secure end-to-end compliant and that we're looking at the bigger problems because it's not about the operating system it's about the infrastructure and what you're going to run on top of it right a lot of people have been saying security oh it's hard to do security open source is actually a problem for security and then the world shifts back and says wait a minute open source is better to attack security problem because it's out more people working on it versus the human problem of having proprietary so obviously open source is a good thing - security what's the modern approach that you see now that that that you guys are watching and building around that because that's the number one question that coot at kubernetes con we saw a great thing do some kubernetes we saw is do service meshes but Security's got to be thought of on the front end of all the application developers that means it's on you put it into the OS and it's a different world right because the application developers are not accustomed to having to deal with that because that was always the job of the IT guys right that was a problem for the infrastructure to deal with and so clearly we have to provide better security better better tooling available to them but the operations guys right they still they need help in this new world as well because suddenly there's this explosion of containers in their environment and who knows what's in those containers right we've got to have the ability to scan the containers and make sure that they get patched regularly right so it's just it's a whole different set of problems but it all starts with making sure it's secure underneath all the rest of it well so that's that brings up the console of this concept of layers right there's all the operational things there's the apps and the containers and then you know rail is running underneath that that's the hardware and the micro code and all the rest of the stuff so this year we the whole entire IT industry - the kind of a gasp with with the meltdown inspector problems that that surfaced or you know I guess it was in January I think yeah when they were Republican what that was that was how the colonel team spent their Christmas vacation oh my goodness yeah I the colonel team the performance team the security team the virtualization team all those guys so Red Hat shuts down for a week at Christmastime if they didn't yeah that was exciting I mean we've been trained security is one of these things but there's another one coming because cyber attacks are there what's that what's the viewpoint how do you keep on how do you how do you keep on top of it yeah well you know we have a fabulous security team so if you happen to get up to the second floor go talk with chrome Chris Robinson his guys they monitor what's going on in the upstreams they work with mitre they work with the organization's right and when they discover that something is in the wind they come to us and disclose people as needed and then we get to go and figure out how we're gonna get fixes in usually a lot of this stuff happens as you know under embargo so we really we can't talk about it that's a real problem if a lot of the upstream hasn't been read in right so like for instance with meltdown inspector a lot of that was going on not so much in the upstream so there were kind of divergent patches that we got to bring back together that was really we knew that well we had a really strong suspicion that the embargo was gonna break early there that's why my guys were over Christmas right they had to have something ready secure for when it broke and then we could worry about the performance afterwards yeah right and then you had to roll that out into the entire customer base there's some fairly standard mechanisms was there anything special with that because it was fairly high priority I suppose yeah well I mean anything like that we make available a synchronously cuz we want to have it available that the day that that embargo goes public right because that's when we're gonna be getting the phone calls that's when people say oh my god now what do I do but if but the hard part with this one was that you had to have the microcode as well right but we had to do a lot of Education because this was this the side channel attacks it's just a different way of thinking right it's not so much a flaw in the code as in the overall hardware architecture that we get to deal with that stuff what did you learn what's the learnings that were magnifying we have to be as transparent as we can possibly be because security researchers are going to keep on looking for this kind of flaw and we you know we just have to be able to work as much in the open as we can but we also have to have an education function right this is not an area of core expertise for a lot of people who are working in databases right or who are who are designing Java apps and yet we have to be able to explain to them why there's a performance impact on some of the stuff that they're doing and how we can work together to try to get back some of that performance over time no meltdown inspector that's kind of off my radar now but I don't think we're completely out of it right you people have had to patch and reboot and and update but it sounds like we're not I don't think we're at 100% for sure of all systems yeah well you know IT infrastructure right there's your window in which you can actually afford to reboot your systems and I think a lot of those are very tightly scheduled I mean we have customers who get you know ten minutes a year yeah up times of years and years I mean old rebooting is kind of old fashioned at this point yeah really right as it should be as it should be but but when it's the minor code you're kind of stuck yeah I mean that's a hardware thing getting back to the hardware still hardware's even though cloud is extracting away the complexities Hardware still is out there so you never gonna go away for you and as you said it's changing look at the GPU side and you got all kinds of new things coming on the horizon like blockchain and decentralized infrastructure that's encrypted amen right so you know this is you know systems level code mm-hmm with software guys who don't know micro code mm-hmm so you guys got to be on top of it so so I guess the big question is is that operating system that you guys have is very reliable and the support is phenomenal use of industries how do you take the support and the engineering in rel and operating systems and bring that operate system mindset to the next level up as you move up the stack kubernetes new OpenStack as well openshift yeah and apps they all want the same reliability you all want the same kind of robustness nature of an ecosystem at the same time more people are being certified yeah so you have a balance of growth and reliability how do you how do you guys see that and it's also speed and time to market right which is the other factor because there's so much pressure on any emerging technology to get the features out there that you end up carrying the technical debt right or you end up not being able to be as hardened as you might like to be the instant that you go out the door and so it's always gonna be a balancing act and a trade-off so you I know you guys were just talking with Mark Oh bill Peter and he was probably talking about how we're trying to focus on use cases right we need to understand the use cases that our customers have and now those are clearly across the entire product portfolio right but those are the test scenarios that I need to get in flight and those are also the the paths that I need to make sure we've optimized for right and so it's a partnership with the rest of the products in the portfolio and we really do a lot to work together as tightly as we can which is one of the benefits of being at the core right I'm working with everybody yeah and you got the instrumentation too so the other theme yeah the automation big time theme here is breaking down the two of real granular level sets of services which actually is a good thing because if you can instrument it then it's just easy to manage because then he can isolate things so I mean this is a good thing in the OS people love this because you can see couple and make things work well but the instrumentation if you have the API API and you need the instrumentation and looking in so how is that created a challenge because it's all those great for Red Hat's business and then you see in the the forecast and the analysts are seeing the growth you guys are seeing the successes but it makes your job harder a bit that one's a harder but I mean it's you know you get it right more code and make glue layers of abstraction layers yeah but I wouldn't want it to be boring well I do want it to I want it to be boring for our customers I want our customers to just be able to pick up and no drum and exciting homes not ringing with no spectra again it's working like a charm no problem yeah drama llama does not live here yeah yeah that's an interesting point though just a lot of talk about the whole Red Hat stack here right and you got as we've said you the base of it where does where does Linux where is this Linux and especially rail go from here what are you looking at that over the next few years some different technologies you're looking to pull it etc mm-hmm there's always I mean we have to keep up with the hardware advances clearly right but then there's let's oh look at our permaban what a great ad right so perma bit for people who don't know they do a video virtual data optimizer so they do D dupe and compression on the fly on the path to the disk and with rail 75 as part of your subscription you get so we buy we buy companies and we open-source their soft code side their software and we make it available to you as part of your subscription right how good is that so is when you deploy 75 in your environment now suddenly you're gonna need a whole lot less storage right depending on of course it depends upon your data footprint right but but you might find that you're able to shrink the amount of all that expensive storage and expensive cloud storage particularly that you need significantly and you get the compression right was avenge compression was very popular we know we followed in fallen permit bit question on permit bit for you was that open source was that they build their front open stores because now and are you guys open sourcing that that's okay so you have to go gain and and then open it up and do a review and clean it up and yeah yeah and we have to help them get it into an upstream right so they actually they were fabulous the perma because they have been so fabulous to work with best acquisition ever seems to be pretty good at acquiring companies and incorporating their tacit that seems to be part of the culture here yeah that's cuz we're not you know people think we're like big and scary right I'll tell you I have worked for companies that are big and scary Red Hat is not it we're really open and it's really in many ways in engineering culture which is wonderful it's a great fit if you happen to be from a startup culture because we don't overwhelm you with process right I mean we a lot of smart people again I can attest to my interactions over the years smart people very humble a lot of systems people to which is cooperating system hello the world's turning into an operating system good for that but humble and plays the long game you guys I've been you deserve credit for that and that's that's attracting and reason why you successful but you know the thing is we really believe in our core values right we really truly honest-to-god believe in open source and the power that it has to change the world that you know you say oh yeah sure right she's part of the management change she's gonna see him anyway yeah but you guys are growing so I mean over the years again since we started the cube nine years ago we've watched red add just in that time span grow significantly I'll see it's well documented an alternative to the other proprietary os's second-tier citizen now running the world the first tier great job so the youth success business model of open source is now mainstream but you got to onboard more people more ecosystem partners in a really dynamic big wave of innovation coming yeah how do you maintain the recruiting how do you get the great people how do you preserve the culture I'm sure these are questions how do you the more inclusion and diversity questions this is all happening right they're gonna have to catch him at nine years old and grown I mean although honest to god we do a lot of university outreach right if you look in the Czech Republic for instance we have a huge operation in Brno which is the second largest city there and we are so tied in to the university system we bring in lots and lots and lots of interns and it's wonderful right because we want to teach people about open-source we find people who have passion projects and we bring them in this is this is our world right we don't we want non-traditional people as well as traditional computer science majors open-source is a great leveler your CV is online I mean imagine right you're you want to change careers you want a new life you love to code you've been working on writing games in your in your spare time you are our people that's the code your code is who you are your code is it's your CV well this is what Oh doing your things on the open means and also it's been great for your business and we had gym writers on earlier there's no a/b testing they just go into the community and find out what's they want and they just that's the a B C's e testing it's just right there you guys do the due diligence sometimes make big time real fun decisions on features based upon what is in demand practically speaking not just focusing on the new tech that's a good business model we hope so cuz you know I mean as as one of our former CFO I said there are a lot of people a lot of Associates at Red Hat who are dependent on Red Hat for a paycheck and it's very important to us that we remain profitable stable and and really good for our people right we've got a lot of people that we need to take care of in the time it's a good place to be in the timing spray with kubernetes and containers we're taking it up a notch and bringing that extensibility you know just beyond stand-alone Linux so congratulations Denise thanks for coming on and sharing your perspective as always we love these conversations in the cube talk and everything from operating systems to core OS and kubernetes and culture as the cue here out in the open on the floor at Moscone West John Troy yer stay with us we'll be back with more day two of three days of live coverage on the cube net we'll be right back