>> 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and do that, but you know, whatever programming language you learn today, it's like oh boy, it seems to change and be out of date there, and if you talk about a masters degree, in IT we're working with, you know, how does the technology and the business, how do they work together.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.