>> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AnsibleFest 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host. Got two great guests here. Dave Lindquist Vice President of Software Engineering at Red Hat and Matthew Jones, Chief Architect, and Ansible Engineer Architect of the automation platform. Matthew, great to see you, Dave, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on for the, for this CUBE conversation. >> Great to see you John, thank you. >> So the big theme here is automation, we've been talking about it for a while. Dave, I think last year we hit this point a couple of times hard. This year, it's kind of going mainstream and it's really exciting because like, this is stuff that's been kind of going around. So it's been growing rapidly. So building on the themes from last year, throughout this year and cloud native with the edge right around the corner, automation is growing rapidly. Okay, so what arenas do you guys think we're in the too hard, too easy, you know, comments like yeah, repetitive tasks are good, but it's more complicated than that now. Are there areas that your customers think are better for automation than others? Can you guys introduce where the action is? >> Sure. Well, I'll get started John. We are clearly seeing an acceleration at our applied automation across full life cycles, across domains. If you step back and think about the journey, many customers are on with their development environments, continuous delivery, inter-cloud, hybrid cloud. The challenges are how to accelerate the use of automation across the full life cycle, across your workloads, across security compliance, across networking, across storage, how to remediate situations. So it's just an acceleration of how do you apply automation into all these different domains? >> Is there areas specifically you think customers thought, no, we'll never going to get there that they're getting there now? Is there specific things you're seeing low-hanging fruit or is there a clear path? What do you guys see about that? Cause you know, this is now we're seeing things now that certainly with the pandemic, a lot more visibility into automation with cloud scale. Is there areas where your customers are saying I didn't think I can get that. Now we can get that. Now we can automate that. >> Yeah. I think a couple of areas jump to mind quickly. One is sometimes referred to as a shift left, but how do you start bringing automation earlier, earlier into the life cycle? One of the things we talked about last year that we've been building on is with advanced cluster management and containers and Kubernetes. And how do you insert automation from Ansible into all the different life cycles? Whether it's setting up clusters, it's deploying applications, it's remediating from security events or compliance activities that's, we're starting to see where customers are really starting to push the envelope on their use automation across those life cycles. >> Matt, how has Ansible evolving to address the demands we've heard in previous interviews with customers specifically to grow past their traditional management automation environments, because that's the real action here. What are you guys doing to address those demands? >> Yeah, you're, you're exactly right. Our, the way that we're evolving is in you know, right. Like we, where we've started as with basic command line tools, really basic integration with systems that developers have been familiar with for years, decades, right? Where we want to grow into is the native automation that makes up the cloud that makes up the services and infrastructure that not just developers interface with, but administrators, DevOps, SRE, common users, normal people who are just trying to get things done. We want to meet them at the systems and at the footprints that they expect. And that's what we want to do. And that the systems and the tools that we're introducing this year, next year, that we've been working on through the pandemic. So I'm moving the ball forward into those areas. >> W what's been along those lines, what's been the, the thought around footprint expansion. Cause that's become a big topic, right? I want to expand my automation space. I want to hire more people. Good luck with that. And it's hard to hire people in this market, but again, automation is, is a human machine and software perspective. So you still need humans. So footprint, automation and team scale. Can you talk about that, Matthew? What do you think about that? >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, we've spent a lot of time focusing on automation in the system space and how these tools connect to those systems and a big theme this year of AnsibleFest has been, how do we, how do we get back to the tools and the processes that people are using and people are building to do that. We've, we've created a whole developer focus space within the automation platform, a suite of tools that integrate into their development environments, their own automation workflows, making it easier to share and collaborate on automation, building communities within their organizations and among their, their internal stakeholders. And I think you'll see that represented here at AnsibleFest and the dedication to those tools and the integration of workloads and not just, not just the tools that they've had before, but the tools that they're learning and gaining experience with right now, the container based workloads and how do we share automation and verify and validate feel good about that automation that it's going to work when we go to production with it, those are the kinds of tools and processes that we're developing and delivering for our customers, for the community, for their stakeholders in their community also. >> What's the big updates this year at AnsibleFest for those people who want to jump in and make and have it be easier for teams to use Ansible and experienced Ansible. And also for the new, the newbies people coming in who are new to automation that could be savvy developers. I mean, people are shifting left with security and everyone's bolting on automation and, or planning it in from the beginning on architecture. So you're seeing a new, a new user base come in to answer well, that's what I hear. What, what specifically are you guys announcing? >> And those new people, they need to be able to come into an organization's process and get up to speed on what their automation, what automation they're working on and learn the ropes, be able to share and collaborate with people who are automating in this space already. We need to be able to give them access to documentation and tooling that helps them get started right away rather than having to fumble around the documentation, have meetings and learn the ropes. We want, we want to make the smooth and, and we want the pipeline of automation to go from the developer and their team into the content publisher publishing and management of automation hub using collections and execution environments that we're introducing here. The same things that they work on and build and produce as automation developers are what they'll use in the automation platform to actually run the automation. And that feels really good, right? The things that you're seeing on your developer workspace that you share with your team and your internal community, you can follow it right through your editor, your ID, through to automation hub. You're going to proving the content right out through automation controller and the automation platform through running that automation. >> Yeah, I think this is a huge point. I mean, Matthew nailed it. I think you have to have the, the ability to go from newbie accelerate quickly to expert because you know, this is the cloud that's cloud scale. There's the life cycle of software development is changing. It's very agile. It's very integrated and newbies can come in quickly and be awesome fast. It's not, you don't need to go to the training old school kind of training modules and get ramped up. You could be instantly running hard. So I think that's a huge point. And we're hearing that. So congratulations. Dave, I want to bring you in and talk about the, how other Ansible adjacent systems that you oversee come together with this release of Ansible. So, so what does it mean for the products okay. That are working together in the management space, because you know, you now have Ansible great track record. Now you have a system in these distributed systems now, enterprising cloud environments or systems working together. What's the impact. >> Yeah, no great question, John, maybe just to start to follow on some of the areas that Matthew was going through, some of the advances in Ansible automation platform are really to ease the deployment and then be able to grow that deployment with scale and distribution, putting execution nodes, wherever you, wherever those nodes need to be the ability to simplify, creating content, access to content collections so that the automation maturity and the use automation can grow. So that couples very nice with many of the investments we have in the broader space of, of management around advanced cluster management for Kubernetes, with ACM around, around our insights, around our edge management initiatives across, across the board. So what I'm seeing, what we're all seeing is how many of the solutions are looking at how you bring many of these disciplines to Garret together. For example, how do we start realizing the promise of event driven architectures from insights? How can we understand what's happening with workloads or infrastructure or compliance issues? And then from the management systems, we can pick up the inventory and the workload and all the specifics about that workload. And then with Ansible, we can then automate and remediate either scale that workload address a, you know, your, your service management processes or hook into even remediation say of a compliance issue. So you're basically bringing together insights with policy, during mechanisms with the automation capabilities of Ansible, which is fascinating and how we start building much more robust automation solutions. Which are required where everything's headed in this hybrid cloud environment. >> I mean, what are some of the challenges that your customers have on that point? There's robust solutions are what everyone wants. It's a natural extension. I mean, you can see what you just laid out. What, what are some of the customer challenges, data that you're seeing there, because this is a path everyone's going down, I'm hearing people discuss this, you know, in the hallways and virtual hallways these days. But you know, for the most part, like, okay, I, I know what I know. I love what I have. I got to start connecting these other adjacent systems together and make them work and automate together. What's the biggest challenge is, is it culture? Is it blockers? Or what's the, or that evolution, maybe you can weigh in too, if you want, this is, this is the key question that everyone's asking. >> Yeah, it's a, it's a key question. And these challenges have been around for some time. One of the, one of the more complex things always in maturing, the use of automation is the interaction with a lot of the existing processes that teams use, which are usually focused on particular domains. So many of the areas that we've been talking about automating the full, the fuller lifecycle is you're actually cutting across the domains and intersecting integrating with many of, many of the processes. So how do you allow the customer to incrementally evolve the automation of these processes across the domains, which brings in identity and access and authorization. It brings in visibility into the resources and the applications and the dependencies. And then of course the wealth of automation, the collections and the playbooks, essentially the content. How do you bring the content together? So the challenges are how do you allow the collaboration across the processes. How do you accelerate access to the content? And then how do you have a level of control to grow identity and access and authentication systems? >> That's awesome. Matthew, what's your reaction on this? Because I mean, you architected the system and you have to envision it working in the future as a lot of headroom involved in this area a lot of automation, what's the blockers? And what's the customer challenges right now that you see that can be easily turned into opportunities. >> Yeah. You know, the culture of automation is so different between, between the different between the different parts of the community, right? Developers expect something completely different than dev ops and network administrators, systems administrators. They just have different expectations on how automation should work. I've been writing software for a long time and the, the, the tension and conflicts between the teams can be extreme sometimes, right? We want to build and design automation capability that works in the domains that each of those people work in so that they can meet in the middle with a common set of tools. Dave mentioned identity, and event based automation, we all know that there are common things that are needed, but we also know that there are different ways to kind of achieve that depending on the space that you're in. And so a lot of, a lot of that has to do with these teams, being able to meet in the middle, collaborate on the automation, use content in the way that they expect, and then still provide that governance and reassurance that it's going to work and do the things that they want to do. Everything that we're doing here is about enabling that and supporting them. >> That's a great point. And I'd say that now more than ever this cultural, I won't say collision, there's always been tension as long as I can remember going back to my career in the eighties. When I started coding back in the day and the systems revolution, it was always tension between these groups because they had their own different worlds and they, (indistinct). But now with automation, there's almost like a peace treaty evolving where the speed game and cloud development becomes the unifying factor, right? If you can enable systems that can go faster because what this, what pisses people off, when someone's slower than they are. Where's that update, or, you know, but now we had harmony, this is cult. This is (indistinct), not touchy feely, Matthew. This is kind of what's going on right now. And David I'd love your reaction because this is like state-of-the-art issue. >> This is this a state-of-the-art particularly when we push the envelope on event driven automation, which leads right into AI ops and edge management and bleach fleet management. Being able to do this automation at scale at tremendous scale, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of endpoints. But let's also, we also have to keep in mind is behind all this is, how do you control the environment? How do you really lock down the security? How do you lock down the full supply chain in this automation, from the content creation to the execution, to what's being authorized to the policies? So these are all the pieces that we're investing in to start pulling together so that we can really push the envelope where automation is taking businesses and their ability to react to change and opportunities and challenges, but also in a controlled manner. >> Yeah. Give me infrastructure code, give me network security and transit and all that good stuff that goes on the network layer. And that mean push code when I want and automate the stuff that pisses people off. And we all get along, right? Matthew is, that's the, that's the future. >> That's right. None of it's optional anymore. Right? There's a lot of people out there. We see that with vulnerabilities and, and security issues that have cropped up over the, over the last year. It's, it's got to be one of the most important things that every organization is thinking about. >> Yeah, I think this site, this whole unification benefit is, is one of the most beautiful things that comes out of the technical benefits of the speed and the, and the advantages of, of the time to value with, with the enablement there. So I think that this is a really cutting edge issue. And thanks for bringing that up and, and discussing, and we're going to continue to talk more about it because we're seeing it very positive outcomes come from this with when you have all of these operational things automating away and then enabling more faster development for modernization. So thanks for, thanks for sharing that. So I just want to close out Matthew with you on saying, congratulations. I know you've been involved a lot of history with Ansible, but I got to ask you, what are you looking forward to most with this release? >> Oh, that's, that's such a good question because the engineering team working, working on some of the core features that we're bringing this time around, we have something that we'd been working on for years now, and it's all coming together with this release. We're really excited about it. Then we've talked a little bit before about collections and execution environments. You know, that goes back to AnsibleFest last year was like, what are we, what are we bringing this year? What, what are we giving you a window into, into our minds? And, you know, we talked about developer tools, but one of the things we've we've spent the most time on is how can we give you that window into your automation, worldwide planet, planet scale, data centers, clouds. It doesn't matter. You, you should be able to run automation anywhere that you need automation to run the Ansible automation platforms, automation mesh lands in this release. And it's the thing I'm most excited about because it gets that automation out to where you need it to run. If you're defining and governing your automation on the east coast of the U S and deploying it on the west coast in Asia, in Europe. Now you can do that and feel really good that it's going to work. It's survivable, it's reliable and it's fast. And the automation mesh brings, brings that to the production side, Ansible automation. And it works with the collections and the execution environments and the developer tools that we built around that to make sort of one scene one system for worldwide automation. And we'll spend the next year building on top of these technologies that we've mentioned that Dave's mentioned event based automation, compliance governance. Now we have the foundation we can build on to really, really sort of take it into the future next. >> You feel there's a lot of headroom there for innovation. >> Tons of headroom. >> Right? >> It's something we're really excited about. >> It's kind of like, it's like, when's the air conditioning going to come out? And they got all these new features coming out. You got to have great stuff there. Congratulations, Dave, we'll end it with you. I want to get your thoughts as AnsibleFest continues to have success with the community. The larger cross domain point that you brought up was key will be a coop con open sources continue to be a tailwind for developers and AI ops. Now you've got the edge exploding with value, new architectures, distributed computing, you know, Red Hats in the middle of it at many levels. What's your take on this revolution in software engineering, as opensource continues to drive as, and, and this new agile and automation kicks in, what's the impact? How do you see that this impacting the, the software, careers and outcomes of producing software? >> Well, the impact of open communities, ecosystems is incredible. It has been for years, and it just continues to accelerate. What I look forward to John with Fest and through this year, and next year is how is how we help bring together the wealth and capabilities of automation to enterprises to scale it to the enterprise across all the areas that they're driving towards. And you rattled off quite a few of them, including edge and security and how we bring the open communities, the open ecosystems, the content creation together with to deliver this value with customers. The growth has been incredible in this space. I don't see it slowing down. I just see it accelerating as the demands on businesses to really accelerate their delivery of new capabilities into market in new regions, with edge in a secure, in a secure manner. So being able to pull the open communities together and scaling this across enterprises, that that's the impact we're having. And it's great. >> It's really like, it's really almost a pinch me moment where you go, Hey, you know, a lot of the stuff we used to worry about is actually being solved. People are getting along scale is the new competitive advantage, modern applications, driving business value. This is kind of like nirvana coming around the corner it's happening. I mean, this is like what we, we, we would, we talked about decades ago, like technology will evolve to a point where it's faster and contributing more to humans. >> Yes, exactly, exactly. >> Great stuff. Okay, Matthew, thank you so much for coming on, Dave. Thank you for sharing. Congratulations. Great event. Stay, stay right there for more continued coverage of AnsibleFest, 2021. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBES coverage of Red Hat summit 21 virtual. I'm John Furry, host of theCUBE. We've two great guests here, returning back CUBE alumni here to give us their perspective. Dave Linquist GM VP of engineering hybrid cloud management at Red Hat. Joe Fitzgerald, general manager VP of the management business unit Red Hat. Guys, welcome back to theCUBE. Congratulations, Red Hat summits, ongoing virtual. Great to see you. >> Thank you, John. >> Thanks John. >> So I'd love to get the low down. A lot going on the productivity this year. Looking back from last year, a lot's been done and we've been in the pandemic now, now circling back a full year. A lot's happened- a lot of productivity, a lot of clear visibility on, on what's working, what's not, you guys got some great news. Let's just jump right into it. What's the big announcement? >> So one of the things that we announced here at Summit, John, is an expansion of our Red Hat insights brand. Basically we announced Red Hat insights for our RHEL platform back in 2015. Over the years, we've increased the amount of data and visibility into those systems. Here at summit, we've now announced Red Hat insights for both OpenShift, and for the Red Hat Ansible platform. So it's a pretty significant increase in the visibility that we have to the platforms. >> Oh, so can you repeat that one more time? So the expansion is through which platform style specifically? >> So Red Hat insights is a way that we connect up to different platforms that Red Hat provides. Historically it was for Red Hat enterprise Linux realm. We've now expanded it to the Red Hat, OpenShift family, the platforms as well as the Red Hat Ansible automation platform as well. >> So a nice broad expansion and people want that data. What's what was the motivation behind it? Was it customer demand? Was it more access to the data? Just, was it on the roadmap? What's the motivation- where where's this going? What's what's the purpose of all this? >> Well, I don't think customers say, Hey, please, you know take more data. I think it's customers say, can you keep me more secure? Can you keep my systems more optimized? Can you help me set more things to automatic? And that requires that you get data from these systems that you can auto tune on, auto- secure, auto optimize. Right? So it's really all those benefits that we get by connecting to these systems, bringing the telemetry data that config different kinds of information, and using that on customer behalf to optimize secure to the systems. >> You know, one of the biggest trends I think now for multiple years has been observability with cloud native, more services are being turned on and off enterprises are are getting a lot of pressure to be modern in their in their application development processes. Why is data more important than ever now? Can you guys take a minute to expand on that? Because this idea of telemetry across the platform is a very interesting announcement because you're turning that data into value, but can you guys expand where's that value coming, turning into? What is the value proposition? Where are people seeing the, the, the key key value points? >> Well, a couple of points, John, as you started out is in a hybrid cloud environment with cloud native applications and a lot of application modernization and the current progressiveness of DevOps and SRE teams, you're seeing a lot of dynamics and workloads and continuous delivery and deployments that are in public environments and private environments, distributed models. And so consequently, there's a lot of change in dynamics in the environment. So to sustain these high levels of service levels to sustain the security and the compliance, the ability to gather data from all these different points, to be able to get visibility into that data. It'd be able the ability to process that with various analytics and understand what when something's gone wrong or when an update is needed or when a configuration has drifted is increasingly critical in that in a hybrid cloud environment. >> So on the telemetry piece is that in open shift as well that that's supporting that as in there has that work. >> It's it's in OpenShift, as Joe mentioned, it's in braille it's in V2 Ansible and the OpenShift space we'd have an offering advanced cluster management that understands fleets of deployments, clusters, wherever they're deployed however they're running infrastructure public private hybrid environments. And it also collects in the context of the workloads that are deployed on those on those clusters to multi-question burn. >> I want to ask you guys a question. I get this all the time on theCUBE. Hey, you know, I need more data. I have multiple systems. I need to pull that data into one kind of control plane but I'm being pushed more and more to keep scaling operations. And this becomes a huge question mark for the enterprises because they, they have to turn up more, more scale. So this is becomes a data problem. Does this solve it here? How do you guys answer that? And what was the, what would be your response to that trend? >> Well, I think the, the thirst for data, right? There's a lot of things you can do with more data. There is a point where you can't ship all the data everywhere, right? If you think about logs and metrics and all the data it's too heavyweight to move everything everywhere. Right? So part of it is, you know, selecting the kind of data that you're going to get from these systems and the purpose you're going to use it for. And in the case of Red Hat, we take data from these different systems, regardless of whether they're deployed bring it in, and then we did predictive analytics against that data. And we use that telemetry that can take that health data right to do everything from optimize for performance or security costs, things like that. But we're not moving, you know, huge quantities of data from every system to Red Hat in order to, you know, pour through it. We are very selectively moving certain kinds of data for very specific purposes. >> Dave, what's your take on that because you know you got to engineer these systems. What's the optimized path for data? Do you keep it in the silo? Do you bring it together? What's the customer's view on, on how to deal with the data? >> Yeah. It is a complex problem. No doubt. You don't want it to be pulling all the data and trying to transmit all that data back into your analytics system. So you ended up curating some data, some of it you afford on often it's done under it will be done under control of policies. So that data that is sensitive, that should stay within the environment that it's in, will stay, but curated or alerts or information that's particularly relevant say to configurations, updates, any any of that type of information will go up into the analytics, into the insights. And then in turn, the alerts will come back down in a manner that are presented to the user. So they understand what actions need to be taken place whether there's automated actions or or they have to get approvals to maybe make an update to a certain environment. >> All right, you got telemetry, data power, the the advanced cluster management ACM. What's the overlap of the visibility and automation here. Can you guys talk about that? >> Well, let's say it's a great question, John what we'd like to do is we'd like to sort of separate the different areas. There's the seeing, right. And what's going on in these environment. Right. So getting the data analyzing it and determining what needs to be done. And then the, you know the recommendation of the automation. As Dave said, in a lot of environments, there's a process of either approvals or checkpoints or, you know evaluation of the changes being made to the system. Right. So separating the data and the analysis from the what do you want to do at this and making that configurable I think is really powerful. >> Yeah. I mean, that's, I mean I think that's the number one thing is like, you know everyone always asks, what do you optimize for do you optimize for the automation or the visibility? And I think, you know, there's always a trade-off and that's always interesting question David- love to get your thoughts. If someone asks you, Hey, I'm a I'm I have a team of people. What do I optimize for? The visibility or the automation or both? Is or is there a rule of thumb or is there a playbook? What w how would you answer that question? >> Well, there's a couple of things. I first, I think the, the ability to pull the data together to get visibility across the environment is critical. And then what becomes often complex is how the different disciplines, how the different parts of the system are able to work together on common understanding of the resources common understanding the applications. That's usually where systems start falling down. And so it's too siloed. So one of the key things we have with with our systems, particularly with OpenShift and row and with ACM and Ansible is the ability to have the common back lane and the ability to have a common understanding of the resources and the applications. And then you can start integrating the data around that common, those common data models and take appropriate actions on that. So that's how you ended up getting the visibility integrated with the automation. >> When you think about this, Joe about the security aspect of it and the edge of the network which has been a big theme this year and going into next year, a lot more discussion just the industrial edge, you know, that's important. You got to take all this into account. How do you, how would you talk about folks who are thinking about embedding security and thinking about now the distributed edge specifically? >> Right. So we thought it was complicated before, right? It goes up a notch here, right? As you have, you know, more and more edge applications I think at the edge, you're going to want automated policies and automated configurations in force so that when a device connects up to a network or is, you know analyzed that there's a set of policies and some configurations and versions that need to be applied to that device, these devices, aren't always connected. There's not always high bandwidth. So you basically want a high degree of automation in that case. And to get back to your early point there are certain things you can set like policies about security or configuration. You say, I always want it to be like this and make it so and there's other things where they're more you know, complicated, right. To, to address or have regulatory requirements or oversight issues. And those things you want to tell somebody I think this should be done. Is this the right thing to do? Is it okay? Do it, but at the edge you're going to have a lot more sort of lights out automation to keep these things secure, to configure. Right. >> It's funny. I was, some of the Ansible guys are talking about, you know code for code, changing code all the time and dynamic nature of some of the emerging tech coming out of the Red Hat teams. It's pretty interesting. You guys have going on there, but you know, you can bring it down to the average enterprise and main street, you know enterprise out there, you know, they're looking at, okay I got some public loud. Now I got hybrid. I'm going a hundred percent hybrid. That's pretty much the general consensus of all the enterprises. Okay. So now you say, okay, if I understand this correctly you got insights on REL, OpenShift and Ansible platform. So I'm, am I set up for an open hybrid cloud? That's the question I want to ask you guys does that give me the foundation to allow me to start the cloud adoption with an, a true distributed open way >> I'll I'll offer to go first. I think there's a couple of things you need in order to run across hybrid clouds. And I think Red Hat from a platform point of view the fact that Red Hat platforms run across all those different environments from the public cloud to on-premise and physical vert to edge devices. Now you have consistency of those platforms whether it's your traditional on REL, your container based workloads on shift or automation that's being turned in by Ansible. Those are consistent across all these different hybrid cloud environments. So reduces the complexity by standardizing those platforms across any and all of those different substrates. Then, when you can take the data from those systems bring them centrally and use it to manage those things to a higher degree of automation. Now you take an, another sort of chunk of complexity out of the problem, right? Consistency of getting data from all those different systems being able to set policies and enforce things across all those distributed environments is huge. >> Yeah. And then, you know, it fills in the gaps when you start thinking about the siloed teams, you know, the, the, I think one of the messages that I've been hearing out of Red Hat Summit in the industry that's consistent is the unification trend that's going on. Unifying development teams in a way that creates more of an exponential value curve rather than just linear progressions in, in traditional IT. Are you guys seeing that as well? I mean, what's your take on this? That's that piece of the story? >> Well, I think the shift that we've seen for the last few years actually quite a few years with DevOps and SRE is started to bring a lot of the disciplines together that you mentioned that are traditionally silos. And you're finding the effectiveness of that is really around many of the areas that we've been discussing here which is open platforms that can run consistently across a hybrid environment, the ability to get data and visibility out of this platform. So you can see across the distributed environment across the hybrid environment and then the ability to take actions in Bourse or update environments through automation is, is is really what's critical to bring things to to bring it all together. >> Yeah. I think that's such an important point, Joe. You know, I was talking with Chris right around and we we've covered this in the past red hats success with academics in the young people coming into in the universities with computer science. It's not just computer science anymore. Now you have engineering degrees kind of cross-disciplinary with SRS is SRE movement because you're looking at cloud operations at scale. That's not an IT problem anymore. It's actually an IT next gen problem. And this is kind of what, there's no real degree. There's no real credential for, you know large scale hybrid cloud environment. You guys have the mass open cloud initiative. I saw that going on. That's some really pretty big things. This is a, a change and, and talent. What's your, what's your view on this? Because I think people want to learn what what do I need to be in the future? What position? >> So John it's a great question. I think Ansible actually addresses a number of the issues you brought up, which is, you know historically there've been different tools for each of the different groups. So, you know, developers had their favorite set of tools and different, IT areas their favorite set of tools and technologies. And it was sort of like a tower of Babel. People did not share the same, you know sort of languages and tools. Ansible crosses both your your development test and operational teams. So creates a common language, now that can be used across different teams. It's easy to understand. So it sort of democratizes automation. You don't have to be deeply skilled in some, you know misspoke language or technology in order to be able to do some level of automation. So I think sort of sharing the same technology and tools I'd like an answer, more democratizing it so that more people can get involved in automating sharing that automation across teams and unifying those worlds is huge, right? So I think that's a game changer as well in terms of getting these teams work holistically integrated. >> Yeah. And there's also a better together panel on the Ansible and advanced cluster management session. Folks watching should check it out on on the virtual event platform on that point while I got you here on that point, let's let's talk about the portfolio updates for advanced cluster management for Kubernetes, what's new since the Ansible Fest, Ansible Fest announcements >> There's quite a bit that's been new since Ansible Fest. Ansible Fest well actually going back to Summit last year we introduced advanced cluster management. For years, we've been seeing the growth of Kubernetes with cloud native and clusters. And what ACM really allows enterprises to do is is scale out their deployments of OpenShift. Well, one of the things we found is that as you're deploying workloads or clusters or trying to take care of the compliance, the importance of integrating that environment with the breadth of capabilities that Ansible has in automation. So that's what we announced that at Ansible Fest following last year's summit what we've done is put a lot more focus on that integration with Ansible. So when you bring up, provision a cluster maybe you need to make some storage or security configurations on behalf of that cluster or if you're taking care of the compliance how do you remediate any issues with Ansible or one of the things that get shown a lot, demonstrate a lot with customers like is when you're deploying applications into production, how do you configure the network? Do the network configurations like a load balancer maybe a ticket into your service management system along with say a threat detection on your security. So a lot of advances with ACM and the integration with a broader ecosystem of IT, in particular with, with Ansible >> What's the ecosystem update for partners? And this has comes up all the time. I want to make sure I get this in there. I want it, I missed it. Last time we chatted, you know, the partner impact to this. You mentioned the ecosystem and you've got native Coobernetti's, non-native what's native to open. You guys have a lot of native things and sometimes it's just support for other clouds. So you start to get into the integration questions. Partners are very interested in what you guys are doing. Can you share the partner update on how they play and what impacts them the most here? >> Yeah. On the events, cluster management ACM front first with this integration with Ansible that actually allows us to integrate with the wealth of partner ecosystem the Ansible apps, which is huge. So that's, that's one, one space. And then the way ACM works, this policy desirous state model is we've been able to integrate with a large number of partners around particularly the security space model the service management space, where they, where we can enforce the use of certain security tools on the on the clusters themselves. So it's really opened up how quickly partner offerings can be integrated into the OpenShift environment at scale across all the clusters that you want, that you need to support it on what the appropriate configurations and policies >> I got to ask you on the insight side you mentioned the expansion across the platform. Now, if you go out and take out to the ecosystem, you know there's guard rails around governance how far can partners push their data in terms of sharing? That's something that might come up when you comment on that. >> Sure. So Red Hat, you know, takes, you know our customer data very seriously. We're a trusted partner to our customers. So the data that we get from systems we make sure that we are following all of the governance and oversight necessary to protect that data. So far, we have basically been collecting that data and using that data at Red Hat. Our plan really is to allow partners with the right degree of governance and control to be able to use some of that data in the future, under the right conditions whether it's anonymized or aggregated, things like that to be able to take that data and to add value to customers if they can enrich customers or or help customers by getting some access to that data without every vendor or partner, having to go out to systems and having to connect and pull data back. That's a pretty tough situation for customers to live with. But I think that fact that we're ahead is trusted. We've been doing this for awhile. We know how to handle the data. We know how to provide the governance. But our plan really is to enable partners to use that data ecosystem. I will say that initially what they had said about ACM and partners, Ansible has been working with partners on the automation side at a very large scale, right? So if you look at the amount of partners that are doing automation, work with us we have some pretty strong, you know, depth there. But in terms of working with partners, our plan is to take the data ecosystem, expand that as well. >> It's really a nice mix between the Ansible OpenShift and then REL, do you guys have great insights across now? I think the open innovation just continues to be every year. I say the same thing. It's almost like a broken record but every year it just gets better and better. You know, innovation out in the open you guys doing a great job and continuing and now certainly as the pandemic looks like it's coming to an end soon, post-pandemic, a lot more projects are being worked on a lot more productivity, as we said at the top. So to end the segment out I'd love to get you guys to weigh in on what happens next. As we come out of the pandemic, the table has been set. The foundation's there, cloud native is continuing to accelerate rapidly in the open OpenSource, going through them on another level. What's next what's, what's going to what's next for customers. Are they going to continue to double down on those? The winds they're going to shut down certain projects. What happens after this pandemic? How do people grow, Dave? We'll start with you. >> Well, I think, yes we all see the light at the end of the tunnel, John. It's great. And I think if a positive, is it really throughout this? We've been accelerated in the digitization and at modernization cross the board across industries. Okay. And that is really teaching all of us a lot about the importance of how do you start managing and running this at scale and securing this at scale. So I think what we'll see coming out of this is just that much more effort, open ecosystems. How you really bring together data across insights? How do you bring in increasing the amount of analytics AI to now do something turn that data into information that you can respond with and that in turn, close it, closing the loop with automation against or against your hybrid cloud environment? We're just going to see acceleration of that occurring. >> Awesome, great insights there. Open data insights, automation, all kind of coming together. AI. You don't have AI in your, your plans. Someone was Wall Street was joking. That's going to be the future stable stakes get listed on Wall Street. You got to have some sort of AI piece. They have great insight, Joe, your take on what's next? What, what what's going to what's going to happen as we come out of the pandemic? >> Yeah. We've definitely seen people, you know advance their digital transformation. And I don't think it's going to stop. Right? So the speed scale and complexity or just put more pressure on teams, right? To be able to support these environments that are evolving at light speed. So I think Red Hat is really well positioned and is a great partner for folks who are trying to get more digital, faster trying to leverage these technologies from the hybrid cloud to the edge. They're going to need lots of help. Red Hat is in a great position. >> Okay. >> You guys doing great work, Dave Linquist, Joe Fitzgerald. Great to have you back on again. Open, always wins. And as end users become much more participants in the open source ecosystem and user contributions and user interactions software at scale, it's now a new come next generation commercial environment, You guys are doing a great job. Thank you for sharing. Appreciate it. >> Thank you John. >> Thanks John. >> Okay. Red Hat Summit 21 CUBE coverage. I'm John Furrier getting all the action from the experts who've been there, done that living through it, being more productive and have bringing benefits to you being open source. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of AnsibleFest 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hello, everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. We're not face-to-face this year, we're in virtual remote mode. This is theCUBE virtual and obviously it's AnsibleFest 2020 virtual. We've got a great panel of experts and leaders at Red Hat and Ansible. I want to introduce them. Dave Lindquist, general manager and vice president of engineering of hybrid cloud management at Red Hat. Joe Fernandes, vice president and general manager of the Core Cloud platforms at Red Hat. And Tom Anderson, vice President at Red Hat, Ansible Automation Platform, the big news and feature of this event. Tom, great to see you, Joe and David, thanks for coming on. >> Great to be here. >> Every year I love talking about Red Hat because I remember going back a few years ago, Arvind from IBM was on at Red Hat Summit in San Francisco, and you can see the twinkle in his eye. This was three, four years ago. Cloud native was really gearing up and now it's kind of mainstream. Last year at AnsibleFest, all the buzz was collaboration, collections, and you can start to see that integration piece kicking in, and this year at the event, the big story is the same. More collections, more integrations, a lot of collaboration around code. Content equals code. So it really points to the trend with Kubernetes of multi-cloud, multi-cluster. So the first question for you guys is, why would anyone want to deploy multiple clusters simultaneously and why is multi-cluster such a big deal? Tom, we'll start with you. >> Great, okay, yeah. So why is multi-cluster such a big deal? Basically, Kubernetes and our OpenShift container platform have now become a strategic part of our customers' environments, of their infrastructure for building and deploying cloud native applications on. And as becoming a strategic part of that, when you're deploying production applications you're going to need all kinds of things like scale out, redundancy, cloud location for access to different cloud provider locations for application requirements and whatnot. So there are a bunch of requirements for why customers would deploy OpenShift in a multi-cluster way. And maybe I'll turn it over to Joe Fernandes a little bit 'cause he's got a lot of background on the OpenShift side of this. >> Joe, what's your thoughts? >> Yeah, thanks, Tom. Yeah, so I mean, as Tom mentions, a number of reasons why customers may deploy or need to deploy more than one Kubernetes cluster. So within a cluster, you can certainly have multiple applications, multiple developers, multiple teams work, but as you start to scale your usage you may want additional clusters. It could be because you want to separate your production environments from your dev and test environments. It could be for capacity, right? You have more development teams or more production environments than you want to sort of tie to a single cluster. Then you start expanding out into locations, right? Maybe you started in the data center, then you started doing deployments to one public cloud, then to other public clouds, and then that's only going to grow. We see more and more customers deploying multi-cloud strategies. And then the new thing right now that everybody wants to talk to us about is edge, and as you get into edge deployments, now those, the number of clusters could really explode into the hundreds or thousands. And so it all points back to you need a sane way to manage across all these clusters regardless of where they run and regardless of how many you have, and that's really what we've been working on with the Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes. >> What's the big draw? What's drawing the customers in with multi-cluster and multi-cloud? Obviously, the multi-cloud makes a lot of sense, you have multiple clouds. Sounds easier just saying it than doing it. But what is it about multi-cluster and multi-cloud that's drawing customers and people into this concept? >> Yes, I can start. I think what's drawing customers in is the need, the desire to have sort of a common abstraction for the applications that's consistent regardless of where they happen to run, right? So making sure that the developers don't have to worry about what infrastructure the applications are landing on, and they have that consistent experience that it's, abstracts their applications away from that infrastructure. So that gives the developers more flexibility, but it's also about flexibility and agility for those infrastructure owners, right, because they too want to make decisions on where stuff runs. Not because they're particularly tied to an infrastructure, but based on things like cost or security or other concerns. And so these are all drivers for multi-cluster and multi-cloud strategies and I think our hybrid cloud strategy at Red Hat really hits the mark to address those needs. >> Well, you guys had great performance. We've been following the past few years just the OpenShift and beyond, kind of the whole Red Hat, and Ansible specifically too, is doing real well in the marketplace so congratulations. David, I want to ask you about the management piece. This comes up over and over again. It's all good having the abstraction layer, you got all kinds of new sets of services, but multi-cluster management is not, (laughs) is not trivial. There's challenges for ops and automation teams. Could you share your perspective on how you guys are looking at the multi-cluster management? >> Sure, sure. The first thing we saw, and this kind of follows on the points that Joe and Tom are making, is that as customers start embracing the development with containers and leveraging Kubernetes, you start finding that they're putting up clusters across their data centers, across cloud, to support different parts of the life cycle of development, or supporting their own production environment or distributed workloads across clouds, across the data centers. And so the challenges that operations and management run into, and security in particular, is how do you start managing the clusters, their life cycle. It's easy to put 'em up, to provision 'em quickly, but how do you update and upgrade those? How do you make sure they're compliant with your various regulatory compliance like PCI, HIPAA, or the various federal standards? How do you make sure that compliance is adhered to across, and security across those clusters, as well as the applications themselves? How do you manage the applications through their life cycle? How do you have deployment policies? So the challenges for ops and automation and security are to have a consistent policy-driven way to take care of the clusters across these hybrid environments, and making sure they adhere to the compliance and security of the enterprise. >> Tom, multi-cluster deployments is a big part of this integration. We heard a little bit, obviously, compliance and governance is huge. IT's been living this world of policies and governance, but when we start moving fast into these new cutting edge services that are providing a lot of value, integration into existing IT infrastructure is important with clusters. How do you view that because this is where I think maybe collections are other things are, is this an indicator of what's happening? Can you give your thoughts on the customers out there who want to do multiple clusters for all the benefits, but then go, "Oh, I got to integrate it into existing IT infrastructure"? >> Yeah, absolutely. So that's what's happening right now. As Kubernetes and as OpenShift has become a strategic platform for our customers, the idea of, I'm going to say, kind of normalizing the operations of that platform as part of a greater IT ecosystem has become a challenge for them. And for the most part, they've already automated security, network, provisioning, app deployment, application updates, using the Ansible Automation Platform, and so it only makes sense that as Kubernetes and as OpenShift becomes a strategic platform for them, they want to use that same language, that same tool set, that same automation fabric, if you will, to integrate the applications that are running on OpenShift with the rest of the environment. So, for example, when I add a new node to a cluster or more capacity to a cluster or to clusters, I probably want to update my systems of record, right? My CMDBs or my ITSM systems. When I deploy a new app or make an update to an app on a cluster or across clusters, I'm probably going to want to update my load balancer to be able to direct traffic correctly to that, and that load balancer probably isn't running, my enterprise load balancer is kind of platform independent, so I'd need to be able to update that load balancer to properly direct traffic. Well, IT has already automated that function using Ansible. So by creating the collections that we have created for OpenShift and for Kubernetes, it makes it much easier for our customers to be able to just plug that in and adapt that to their existing automation infrastructure. So now it just becomes part of their overall IT environment. >> So just a follow-up real quick, if you don't mind. What are some of the challenges you're hearing from your customers around containerization and that growing space? I just talked to the IDC research analyst earlier at another virtual CUBE session where she says, roughly their estimate is 5 to 10% of enterprises are containerized, which is huge growth opportunities. The headroom in containers is massive, so what are some of the challenges? Is it easy to get started? This seems to be a nice opportunity for you guys. What's your take on that? >> Yeah, I think that the way of looking at it with all that growth space, it's also the speed at which Kubernetes adoption and containerized application adoption is happening. And so, IT organizations are having to respond faster than they ever have before as this environment grows, and it is a multi-cloud environment. They have Kubernetes, OpenShift running on-prem, in the cloud, multiple data centers, as both Joe and Dave have said, and it becomes critical that they automate that correctly and accurately to ensure security, consistency, performance, availability. All of the other things that drive the requirement for automation standardization, all of those things that drive the requirements for automation are applicable to Kubernetes environments and containerized environments as well except they're moving and expanding faster, so teams have to respond quicker to the need. >> Joe, what's your take on this? I mean, to me, I'm the glass half full. I think I've seen containers be great and that maybe I'm looking at the early adopters, but those numbers seem a little bit low to me. What does that mean to you? More people are now getting up to speed. Is it a tipping point? It just seems a little bit low, and David, if you want to comment too, I think this an important number there. Joe, what's your take? >> Yeah, I mean, I think the rate represents an opportunity, but I see the growth as having been tremendous even in just the first few years. But to get to that broader market we did continue making it easier for customers to bring their applications to this new environment, to ride on existing infrastructure, and ultimately for our customers that means an evolution, right? An evolution of how they are going to manage those applications, how they're going to build and deploy them. And so with the integration of OpenShift and our advanced container management platforms with Ansible we can bring that automation to the mix to sort of tie those together, right? So to tie in the existing compute infrastructure, to tie in storage and networking and configure those as needed. And then as Tom mentioned, all those other systems, whether it's an IT service management system, something like a ServiceNow or other ticketing systems or other enterprise systems that exist that you just can't ignore. Because the more you try to go against the grain and do something different, the even harder it'll be. So we need to help customers evolve to take advantage of cloud and cloud native approaches, and the solutions that we're bringing to market are all about enterprise Kubernetes, enterprise container platforms. The combination of those technologies with something like Ansible really helps pave the path for the next phase of growth that we're expecting. >> So, ready for prime time right now. >> Right. >> David, your thoughts real quick on this. Containerization upside. >> Yeah, real quick, the development organizations, development teams, have picked up on containers very rapidly. Everybody is leveraging containers when they develop new applications or modernize the existing applications. So what we found is that a lot of the folks that pushed out very quickly, some greenfield apps, that's the 5, 10, 15, 20% that you're seeing occur. What started getting complex is how you really scale this to your enterprise. How do you really run this at scale from management operations and security perspective? OpenShift is critical, that gives a consistent platform across the hybrid cloud environments. What we're doing with ACM and the Advanced Cluster Management brings in the security and compliance. And what you'll see through AnsibleFest, what we're doing with Ansible is then, how do we then hook these environments right into all the existing IT environments? That's, to me, what's critical to really bring this to scale to the enterprise. >> Yeah, I think this, to me, the number points to exactly what you guys said. Ready for prime time, scale's there, and the demand's there. And I think, Tom and Joe, I want to ask you specifically the relationship between OpenShift and Ansible, but before that, I remember, forget what year it was, we were doing a CUBE event at, I think it might've been OpenStack, going back to the day, but I remember OpenShift and it was a moment where OpenShift adopted containers and then next year Kubernetes. And I remember talking to the team, them saying, "This is going to be a big bet for OpenShift." Looks like it was a good bet. (laughs) It paid out real well, congratulations. And it was good, you guys stayed the course. But you made it easier, and one of the things was is that the complaint at the time was they didn't want Kubernetes to be the next Hadoop. Easy to use but gets out of control. Not that I meant they're comparable, but Hadoop had that problem of it was easy open source but then it was hard to manage. So OpenShift really took advantage of that. You guys, I think, did a good job on that. But now you got Ansible winning the game on developers, on easy to deploy, so as that scales up, automation's there. So I'd like to hear you guys talk about the connection between OpenShift and Ansible and how that expands the scope of what both products can do for customers. >> Yeah, maybe I'll give it a shot first and then let Joe go after me, which is, look, here's what we have, is we have lots and lots and lots of customers, Red Hat customers that are OpenShift users and that are Ansible users, right? So we have this two large pools. They also represent two very large and vibrant open source community projects. The Ansible project and the Kubernetes project are two hugely popular, vibrant communities, and so it just made sense to kind of be a catalyst in those communities, to bring those two things together, to work together, to the benefit of our customers and to kind of capture the innovation that's going on upstream in the communities. So we decided to get really kind of serious about the integration of these two platforms and integrated Ansible in a native way on Kubernetes so that OpenShift and Kubernetes operators, as well as application developers, could take advantage of that integration without having to learn something new or foreign in order to be able to do it. So it was a native integration using operators, which is the right way to integrate with the Kubernetes platform, with OpenShift in particular. And so that's the way we kind of brought it together to the benefit of our customers. Our customers are, like I said, normalizing the operations of OpenShift as a strategic part of their infrastructure, deploying production applications, and want to be able to tie that into their other systems and other parts of their infrastructure, both from an app deployment process as well as from an infrastructure deployment and management process. So it only made sense that it actually, our customers have been asking us for this and talking to us about this, so it only kind of made perfect sense to kind of get out there and do that, get the communities together innovating, and then take that innovation out for our customer. >> Joe. >> Yeah, the only thing I'd add to that, there's really two specific personas at play here, right? When you think of, there's the IT operations and infrastructure teams. They own those clusters, the provisioning, the configuration, the management of those clusters. And with ACM, with Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, we have now an interface that they can use to see and manage the life cycle of all their clusters. So through that we can integrate Ansible as another automation tool in their portfolio to do things that need to happen when those clusters first get configured or when those clusters get updated and so forth. So if they need to update an ITSM system or configure a network or do whatever it needs to, you have Ansible automation scripts that can be plugged in at the appropriate time in that cluster's life cycle to do that. On the other side, you have the developer and DevOps teams that are consumers of these platforms, right? And what they care about is the applications that they're building, but there's a lot that goes into building it, right? There's the source code management systems, there's the CI systems, the CD systems, there's the test environments and stage and prod. And so there's a lot of moving parts, and again, and then there's the services themselves that they're configuring so you have, or building, not configuring, you have Ansible again ready to sort of take on some of those tasks, automation tasks that go beyond what Kubernetes is focused on or what you're trying to do with OpenShift. And again, doing it at the appropriate time in the life cycle, all tied in through Advanced Cluster Management which can actually see out to all those clusters and be in that sort of application deployment workflow across those clusters. So those are sort of some of the specific areas and how they pertain to those specific personas that are driving the activity. >> What's interesting, this automation piece really is key across multiple environments, and we've heard that from some of your customers. 'Cause you got now private clouds out there, you got large scale. But, Dave, I want to ask you, what makes Advanced Cluster Management a natural fit with OpenShift and Ansible? What's your take? >> Yeah, good question, John. First, ACM is purpose-built for the Kubernetes environment. It's a cloud native management system, and as we said earlier, we really focused on managing the cluster life cycles, managing the security compliance, and managing applications deployed into these environments. So it was a very natural extension of OpenShift, to be able to manage OpenShift, multiple clusters of OpenShift in hybrid environments. Within your data center, across data centers, across clouds, and the combination. So, very natural fit with OpenShift. As we've been all talking about, as we looked at how did we then bring OpenShift and these resources closer through automation to many of the other parts of your IT environment, that made it natural from ACM to call out into the playbooks of Ansible. So just a simple example, and I think we circled around this a few times. You're deploying a cluster or you're deploying, say, an application to that cluster. You need to configure that into a firewall. Maybe configure it into a load balancer. Maybe register it with a service management system. That, all those calls, they come out through policy from ACM over into Ansible to take advantage of the wealth of playbooks that are available in Ansible to perform those operations. Whether it's security, network, service management, storage, et cetera. >> Real quick follow-up for you is, how has bringing your ACM team and product into Red Hat changed the scope and approach of what you're trying to do? >> Yeah, well, let me say first of all it's been a great experience bringing the team into Red Hat. The environment, the open culture, it's really been invigorating for the whole team. Also, getting much, much closer into the open communities and open sourcing ACM and doing development in the open has really brought us closer really to users, the ecosystem, the communities, accelerating our delivery quality, as well as really getting much more closer insights, getting insights into what's happening in the community, what's happening with the users. So it's really, it's been a great experience all the way around. >> Joe and Tom, quick comment, what do you think people should pay attention to this year at AnsibleFest 2020? What's the big story? Obviously we're in a pandemic. We're going to come out of the pandemic. People want to have a growth strategy that has the right projects on the right rails. They want to either maybe downplay some of the projects that maybe not be a fit, that were exposed during the pandemic. Best practices that are emerging, shifting left for security is one. You're seeing remote workers. People have kind of had a wake-up call on cloud native being relevant for the modern app. Now they're running as fast as they can to build the infrastructure, and guess what? People are not actually in the workplaces. The workforce, the workplace has all changed. Can you guys share your expertise over the years on what is the best practice and approach to take? Because the clock's ticking. >> Yeah, from my perspective and from an Ansible perspective here, we had always been about kind of automate everything, right? Automate every task that is automatable, right? A repeatable task, automate it. Repeatable task, automate it. And over the past couple of years we've really been focused on automation across teams by using Ansible content, the actual automation code, if you will, itself to bring teams together and to cross teams and cross functions. So not just focused on what a network operations person or a network engineer needs to do in their day-to-day job, but connect that to what a security operations person is doing day-to-day in their job in terms of threat detection and intrusion response, or intrusion detection and threat response, and connecting those two teams together via automation to make both of them more responsive and more effective. So we've been on this bandwagon for the past couple of years around Ansible content, and now Ansible collections and Automation Hub, to try and accelerate the way these teams can collaborate together. The pandemic and the pressures that put on the system with remote users and having to do things in a different way only exacerbated, it only kind of enhanced the requirement for that collaboration, that automation across teams. So in a lot of ways, the past six, seven months, both for our Ansible business as well as for the way our customers have been using the technology, has really been an accelerator for that kind of cross-team collaboration, our subscription business, and our Ansible consumption. >> Yeah, well, I said it last year in-person when we were in Atlanta for AnsibleFest 2019, a platform approach is a great way to go. You start out as a tool, you become a platform. You guys are doin' the work over there. I really appreciate it and I want to call that out 'cause I think it's worth calling out. Joe, cloud platforms. Cloud is certainly an enabler. Red Hat and OpenShift has been a great success and can, only has got more work to do. People still got to build out these platforms, and you're seeing private cloud not going away. I mean, we just had a conversation at OpenStack and you guys got customers with a lot of private cloud everywhere. (laughs) So you got private, you got hybrid, you got multi, and you got public. It's pretty crazy. What's your thoughts on what people should take away from AnsibleFest and then going forward post-pandemic? >> Yeah, so, first Tom hit on a number of key points there, right? COVID-19 and everything going on in the world has really just accelerated a lot of these transformations that were already in the works at many of our enterprise customer accounts, right? And now when we're all working remotely, we're all meeting virtually, we're educating our children remotely, it just exacerbates the need to scale our networks, to extend security out to remote workforces, and to do all of these things at much larger scales than we ever envisioned before, and you can't do that without automation. And I would argue, without taking advantage of some of these modern cloud native platforms and cloud native development approaches. And we always say Red Hat's been a big proponent of hybrid cloud, of our open hybrid cloud strategy. We've been talking about that for years, and what we always say is even if that's a strategy that you aren't specifically looking for, it's something that, everybody ends up there, right? Because nobody's running everything in the data center anymore, but as they move out to public cloud they're not completely shutting those data centers off either. As they expand their consumption of public cloud, they tend to start exploring multi-cloud strategies, and now that hybrid cloud is extending out to the edge. So the hybrid cloud is sort of where everybody is, right? And the ability to sort of manage consistently, to run consistently across all those environments, to be able to secure all those environments and scale those environments, and that's what we're all about here at Red Hat and that's sort of the key to our open hybrid cloud strategy and what we're really trying to do with our entire portfolio. >> Awesome, David, final word. We're in a systems world now. The cloud is one big distributed computer. We got the edge, we heard that. Developers just want to code, they want infrastructure as code, you guys got to help 'em get there. What's your take on the importance of AnsibleFest and this systems world we live in? >> Well, there's probably not a more critical time. We've all been saying this and seeing this the last 10 months now. The transformation digitally that's been going on for years, the development transformations, it's all hit a fever pitch. It's been accelerated through COVID. In particular, how quickly can I adjust to a digital transformation? How quickly can I adjust my business processes? How quickly can I really become a very agile DevOps SRE organization? That is so critical. So at AnsibleFest what we're doing is bringing together platforms with automation with the ability to manage it at scale with security. That's what's going on from Red Hat in a open environment, open world, with communities and huge ecosystems. That, to me, is the critical rallying points, and really necessary to drive this accelerated transformation. >> Yeah, and again, open source continues to power it. One thing I'm impressed with is this concept of content, not content as in a video, but content as code. It's collaboration. It's what people are sharing their playbooks and they're sharing their, are opening things up. I think there's going to be a whole 'nother level of developer collaboration that's going to emerge and you guys are on the front end of all of this. I think it's going to be pretty powerful. I don't think yet clearly understood yet by most folks, but when you start seeing the automation benefits, Tom, I'm sure your team will be like, "Yeah, see, automation platform." Thank you so much for coming on, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thanks a lot. >> Thanks. >> I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, hosting theCUBE virtual for AnsibleFest 2020 virtual. Thanks for watching. (relaxing music)

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas! It's the Cube, covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> We're back at IBM Think 2018. This is day three of our wall to wall coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. A lot of times in the Cube, we talk about how CIO's understood a while ago, they just can't take their business and put it up into the cloud. Rather, they have to bring the cloud operating model to their data. So that's a topic that we're going to talk about with Dave Linquist, who's here. He's an IBM fellow and Vice President of Private Cloud at IBM and Ajay Apte, who's a Distinguished Engineer of IBM Cloud Private. Gentleman, welcome to the Cube. Good to see you again! >> Good to see you Dave. >> Thank you. >> So, Dave, let's start with you. IBM Cloud Private, you heard my little narrative at the beginning. I think it's consistent with what your philosophy is, but what is IBM Cloud Private? What's it all about? >> Sure. Well why don't we just start with, there's public clouds, private clouds, hybrid clouds and the ability to match your workload requirements with the particular cloud, is very important. And having that consistency between private and public, so you have that flexibility, whether it's security, performance, cross aspects, regulatory, et cetera, is an important part of a multi-cloud strategy. With Private Cloud, in particular, we introduce Private Cloud, the offering is called IBM Cloud Private, last year. And the demand has been through the roof at the enterprises. What we're effectively doing, is bringing cloud-native technologies, right into the enterprise. It's really quite cool. We're bringing Kubernetes and containers into the enterprise, optimizing a lot of the core enterprise middleware, so it runs on this optimized Kubernetes environment and then integrating it with the security and operational systems of the enterprise. >> So as you said, you only recently, really, announced the IBM Cloud Private and you talked about private cloud for years, as did others. But others, maybe, had an offering, but the offering really didn't work. It really wasn't the cloud experience, so what did you guys have to go through... I mean, it's not trivial to get that cloud experience. So maybe Ajay, you can talk about, sort of, how you got there and what you had to do to get there. >> Right. We started with some use cases that we had in mind. So let me talk about three, very core use cases that we started with. The first one is, IBM has an anonymous enterprise grade, production ready, footprint of middleware in our customer's data center. We wanted to bring that footprint to a containerized wall, to a cloud-based operational model. When I say enterprise grade footprint that customers have today, they measure the success of that footprint in terms of KPIs, in terms of resilience, in terms of reliability, in terms of security and compliance, these kind of things. We wanted to bring the same qualities of services to a private cloud model, in a container model That was probably one of the main use cases that we started targeting. On the other side of the spectrum, the cloud-native micro-services based department. This is where most of the developers are interested in today. This is where really high velocity, agility, can be achieved. So that was the second use case that we were targeting. In both those cases, the key also is that customers already have existing tools and practices, those kinds of things, the data center. The idea was to very seamlessly integrate into that set of tools and practices and even people within the data center, while providing the same cloud operational model. And then the third main use case was around integration. By integration, there are various dimensions to integration. There's integration between the footprint that's running on PrIM with the things that are not running in containers. They my be running in DMs or bare metal instances or maybe whole systems running on our main frame, like IBM Z systems, right? And then there will be other services, may be running SAS services in public cloud, so the integration scenario is basically expanded from our legacy footprint all the way into the public cloud SAS connector, so that integration was the third use case for us. So those three use cases, I would say, became the foundation of what we did over last one year. >> So Dave, in thinking about, you know, bringing the cloud-operating model to the data, what should clients expect, in terms of that experience? Is it substantially similar? Identical? Are there huge gaps? What do you tell people? >> Well, that's a good question. What they're going to experience is, when you're using public cloud environments, what you'll see is your developers get rapid access to the content they need to start developing applications. And it fits very well into their agile DevOps life cycles, high iterations. And what you'll see is, operations teams often refer to it as site reliability engineering in a cloud model. They have access to all the efficiencies of cloud for deployment, scale, recovery, maintenance, all those types of pieces. So what a customer will experience is we're bringing those capabilities into the data center, but as Ajay pointed out, we're then able to run a lot of the core transactional data, analytic, messaging workloads right on that environment, so the developers get rapid access to that type of content, what they need. And the operations, can leverage those capabilities on a cloud infrastructure. That's the experience they're going to get, matching up the enterprise requirements with the cloud-native. >> Is the impetus to take that proprietary data, that 80% of data Ginni Rometty talked about that isn't searchable on the public web. Is the impetus to get leverage out of that data, that they don't want to put into the public cloud, or is to modernize their applications and cut their costs? Probably both, but I wonder if you can talk to-- >> There are many higher level, type of scenarios and use cases, so one that Ajay went through is, really modernizing your applications, extending with innovation. But as Ginni talked about, and I think, you probably had sessions earlier on IBM Cloud Private for data, what we're seeing is how we can bring many of the critical data services together, from data science experience and data analytics and data governance and movement and management, into this cloud technology, so that it can be used against the data that's in the data center, within the enterprise to start getting insights into that data and furthering their business. >> Ajay, I wonder if you can take us inside the development process, even the thought process behind how you approach this. The secret sauce, how you approach this challenge, maybe, differently, than historically, you've approached system design? >> Right, so since the whole idea of IBM Cloud Private is around cloud operational model, high velocity, agility, those are the things we are preaching to our customers. The very key principle there is, using those in our development, as well. Our development itself, is built on the same, open source DevOps tool chains, the cloud operational principles, so that we can achieve the exact same velocity, agility, that our customers are expecting to achieve with the kind of offerings that we are trying to make over here. So that's, sort of, the first key principle for us. The second principle, is around production readiness. When we are expecting a customer to run production-ready workloads, we have security, compliance, reliability, these kinds of things, the same principles apply back to the platform that they're going to use for running those workloads, as well. So the first thing is, we are our own customers. We have to apply the same principles to our platform, so that customers can do the same thing. Our platform is, sort of, a layered model, where we have Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry as the containerization model, but we also have a plethora of IBM and non-IBM and open source middleware software, that's running on top of that. And then, we have customer applications running on top of that, so we have to make sure that as we build this platform, all these layers are taken care of, in terms of how we can deliver a production-grade offering end to end. Like, when we talk about Watson Studio, what Ginni mentioned yesterday, running as part of ICP for data, for example, The idea of running that, where it's not just about ICP running a database, it's about what happens to the life cycle of the data and how ICP gets designed to make sure the life cycle of that data can be managed in a containerized model. Those are the kinds of things that became very important for our philosophy. >> Having a little fun, our development team rocks! They are incredible. What our organization has done, it's fully embraced all the agile DevOps capabilities, it's all developed on a cloud environment, we actually use ICP in our development of our IBM Cloud Private. It's weekly iterations, two week sprints, and every quarter, we have a major release. We've done that the last four quarters, we've had a major release come out. It's really been exciting. >> So one of the great things about shows like this, is that you can't walk around without bumping into a customer. So, my question, Dave, is what are they telling you? What's resonating with the customers, in terms of the services that they're consuming? What are they like? What do they want? What are they asking you for? >> So we did what we consider a soft launch in June, where wanted to get some experience and feedback from users and operations. And what we actually did, is opened a open-select channel with our users. So we had tens of thousands of downloads that came with that very first release and we got feedback continually on what they liked from content, how they liked the environment, the whole experience. In the beginning of the fourth quarter, we did a major launch with all the middleware capabilities, that content on the platform, it just took off. Since that time, we have upwards of 150 global accounts picked up IBM Cloud Private and started and going through the deployment, some are even going into production. The thing that resonates with them so quickly, is they have so many existing workloads that they've been trying, to really, bring into this dev transformation, trying to bring into cloud technologies and this creates a journey, a path for them through application modernization and then adding all kinds of innovation with micro-services for refactoring or even adding Watson Artificial Intelligence Services into the environment. >> Ajay, I started off asking you, sort of, where you got the motivation, a good starting point, your answer was outside in. You started with the customers, looked at use cases. Having said that, you're trying to replicate, mimic, to the greatest degree possible, the public cloud experience, so there's a reference model there. So when you think about what's next, do you, sort of, pop over to your public cloud colleagues in the IBM Cloud and have a little bake off and see? Where do you get your motivation going forward, your, sort of, road map ideas. Obviously, the customers, but do you benchmark yourself against public cloud to try to close that gap? How do you approach that? >> Sure, there are multiple dimension. Customers, of course, is one of the important ones. Having a consistent story between IBM Public Cloud and IBM Cloud Private, is an absolute key principle for us. It's not just a requirement, but it's not just about keeping them functionally consistent, keeping them expedience-wise consistent, but making sure that when customers embark on the journey of hybrid deployment, be it, in terms of doing my dev test in public and then moving to IBM Cloud Private for production, or be a bursting scenario, these kind of things. Customers, not only want to run their application seamlessly, they want performance, they want network connectivity, they want secure connectivity, these kind of things. So that becomes another angle, in terms of how we are growing this, we have public, we have private, we can build a seamless hybrid storage today, but how do we evolve that hybrid storage to make sure that we can give them the same qualities of service? Just because you move your application from private to public, if the data stays on private, the performance is going to really impact, it'll suffer. How do you make sure that those kinds of things are taken care of when customers truly build that? So that's the second dimension of how do we really take the customers on the hybrid journey? And the third important one, is that customers, of course, are going to deploy on our cloud, on other clouds, right? They will always have multiple clusters, geographically distributed. How do we manage their entire footprint and give them the right views for deployment, management, accountability, these kinds of things, across that entire real estate, right? What we generally call hybrid cloud management, multi-cloud management. >> And that's a really, fundamental technical challenge, presumably. To create that similar capability, that consistency, maintaining performance. You've got a got of challenges there. Good thing these guys are rock stars! Alright, Dave. We'll give you the last word. If you had to summarize Think 2018 in less than 10 words, what would you say? >> Accelerate your transformation with cloud. That's what I would say. Leverage the technologies across IOT, public, private cloud, AI, block chain, and accelerate the transformation. >> Ajay, Dave, thanks very much for coming to the Cube. Good to see you again. >> Thank you. >> Alright, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be right back with our next guest. You're watching the Cube, we're live from Think 2018. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering InterConnect 2017, brought to you by IBM. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We are live in Las Vegas, at the Mandalay Bay, for IBM's InterConnect 2017. It's the cloud and big-data Watson show that's all kind of coming together. This is theCUBE's three-day coverage, wall-to-wall day two, coming to an end here. I'm John Furrier, with my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Dave Lindquist who's an IBM Fellow, vice-president of Cloud DevOps and Analytics, at IBM. Great to have you on theCUBE, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you, John, thank you, Dave. >> So, love to have the IBM Fellows on, because we can then, like, get down and dirty, right? Get down and talk about the tech. I don't see if Ginnie's on stage today, I love the bumper sticker she has, 'cause she's, she nails it; enterprise strong, data first, cognitive to the core. So, enterprise strong means, there's a cloud-readiness equation going on right now, and we just came back from Google Next, and, hey, we've got great technology, buy us. Well, SLAs matter. You know, being enterprise ready isn't always about the best tech. >> No, no. >> It's about everything; it's the data, it's the machine-learning, it's the software, and also, those table stakes going on in the enterprise. Unpack that for us. >> Sure. Well, I think a lot of what you just went through, is at least part of the driving force between bringing ops into the dev space, this DevOps thing, and we'll expand on that in a little bit. But one of the big pushes going on is really around site reliability engineering, and how do you appropriately bring the skills together with the development teams to really set systems up in elastic scale, recovery-oriented compute models, so that you can scale that with the demand, you can recover from situations, you can recover from failures, you have a lot of redundancy built in the system. It takes a lot of time for teams to mature, to understand that, that aspect of delivering cloud services and delivering applications into, into a continuous available environment. >> What's IBM's formula for that right now, is you guys ramp-up and scale-up the cloud, IBM Cloud, you have the soft layer, and that's now Bluemix. So you have, on the lower end of the stack, you got to get that hardened infrastructure, if it's a service, and the platforms and service stuff. Then you start to bleed into the Bluemix. It's all one Bluemix now, but, you've got app developers, they want infrastructure as code, they want data as code, but then you got to have an uncoupling of set of services that look like one set of services. How hard is that, and what are you guys doing specifically to talk to customers about the value you're bringing on both sides of that camp? You know, the hard workload focused hybrid, to the creative sizzle of an app. >> Yeah, well, lot in that question, there's a lot of parts, lot of parts there. One of the things that's clearly going on, is, taking that next step in loose coupling systems, creating more independent services that can scale, elastically, independently of each other, the recovery-oriented models, and then presenting those services, up at the layers you mentioned; at the infrastructural areas, compute-storage networking, into the paths and container layers, so that the application developers can very rapidly get the environment they need, compose the services that they need, like the runtimes, data, messaging, et cetera, as a loosely-coupled system, and then build their applications to be deployed into that environment. >> How much innovation is going on? You're starting to see now, a new trend where there's more hardware engineering going into some chips, and hardware configurations, that's essentially software-driven, to offload, maybe machine-learning, some other, cooler things, that can assist some of the hard stuff that frees up more creativity on the software side. Say, machine-learning is a great example, you're starting to see Intel and others start thinking, okay, let's put some stuff on a chip. You have 5G wireless, you've got autonomous vehicles coming, a whole new hardware paradigm is kind of emerging with the cloud; how do you see that playing out, from an innovation standpoint? How does that strategy play out from a cloud, and IoT? >> To me, a lot of the things that are so exciting that's going on in the cloud, probably the big driver in the cloud is this whole acceleration of innovation. How quickly can you get from, instantiate an idea, in-field, iterate in-field with your users, towards a business outcome, and as you hit those outcomes, start scaling and expanding that out. And a lot of that innovation is building on some of the things that you mentioned: big data, cognitive, IoT, social, how do you start bringing these things together? And so, as you bring this together, real-time, you clearly need just exponential growth occurring, in compute capacity, which is probably creating, not probably, it's creating all kinds of opportunities for breakthroughs in algorithms, and breakthroughs in the hardware to support that. >> The other thing that we're seeing, I want to get your thoughts and commentary on is, how analytics is so compatible with the cloud, because, you're seeing that sweet spot developing nicely, and also with cloud-native trend is booming. You're seeing cloud-native compute foundations got big traction, and then the analytics is, people have no problem putting that in the public could, but yet they want the hybrid over here for some other stuff. So the workloads are starting to settle into their swim lanes. Your thoughts on the DevOps equation, as analytics moves to the cloud, not exclusively, but you know, for the majority of cases, and this cloud-native trend that's coming down the pike. >> Yeah, so, break that down in a couple pieces, the cloud-native trend, as well as the analytics trend. The cloud-native trend, what you see is a lot of development with micro services, and part of what makes that so exciting, is the culture of the teams and how they come together. You're basically seeing small teams, small, integrated teams, often called two-pizza teams, or squads, where you pull together designers with developers, with tests, with data science, with business, insights business strategy, into a team that then works together through the whole life-cycle, iterating incrementally and delivering in-field, to, as they move towards that business outcome that they're trying to achieve. So, what cloud-native is doing, is allowing, where that micro service model is really allowing many of these teams to work with relative autonomy, but accountability for their service, as it comes together to bring the full system together. What we're learning is that, one, you get a lot of speed like that, but then you start to, you need a level of analytics to help understand how that's coming together through that whole life-cycle, and what I mean by that is, you know, how is the testing coming along? So that everybody needs to start adopting more continuous testing, from unit tests, right, performance testing, availability, right into security testing. So you start running basic, simple analytics, where you start gathering on how the teams are doing in the continuous testing, and you can start setting soft and hard gates. An example of a soft gate might be, code coverage is dropping, so send an alert to the team to say, you've got to step up the code coverage. A hard gate might be, a security scan failed, so stop the deploy. And so, that's a basic set of analytics, but, the fun areas, to me, the exciting areas, we're starting to apply much more sophisticated models, are in understanding code health, and how the teams are actually working together. So you start developing models-- >> It's almost like team chemistry and coding working together. It's like, hey, you guys are good. You know, you're in the zone, you know? You're in the coding zone. Yeah, but this is a good point, I want to highlight just, let's just stop on that one point, I want to just drill down. I think that you nailed something that's, we've been kind of teasing out, and you put into words, the cloud-native trend around micro services, you mentioned teams working together, maybe some shared analytics, and kind of, code health, team, you know, scoreboard, or whatever. This is way beyond agile. I mean, agile has been a term that's been talked about inside companies, hey, let's be agile. You're talking about a fundamental industry reconfiguration of the players, so this is like a whole 'nother ballgame. >> To me, it builds on agile, what's going on, it does build on-- >> It goes beyond, it's-- >> But it goes way beyond, and even, you know, the early thinking, in DevOps, I think we're really pushing the envelope when we still call it DevOps, because we're thinking of the broad life-cycle of, you know, design practices. How do you begin to understand your users and what you're trying to accomplish with your users? Then you get into, you know, continuous integration, delivery, and testing, but then where it gets real interesting, is you start instrumenting everything, including, you know, getting direct LAN to site insight into how your users are using what you're deploying, and that causes the ability to pivot very rapidly, daily, weekly, into, you know, guiding where you're going to take your next iterations. To me, that's what's really taking this way past what you typically saw in an agile-- >> So what's happening to this traditional IT function? How is it adapting? You know, is it bi-modal, is there subtraction layer coming in, is there an equilibrium being reached between old and new? How would you describe what's going on? >> Fascinating question. What I often see in most of the enterprises I work in, is, they have a couple of investments going on. They're on a journey, a dev transformation journey, and a lot of that is, you know, really at the core of it, embracing DevOps. But what you'll see is, there's groups really pushing the envelope in these teams with cloud-native, micro service development, really all about speed, how quickly can they take small teams, get the idea into market? But then what you also see going on is, large sets of very valuable assets that data transactional systems, and how do you start embracing more, and more automation, to really reduce the cycle times, improve the service levels, and to effectively, start taking cost out of that full equation, that full life-cycle. So, what you're seeing, is a lot of automation coming into the existing IT environment. You're seeing a lot more of taking down of the silos of ops, and development teams, and that's going on in the core areas, and in the more cloud-native area, you're seeing, there's actually a common team put together, and they basically own the whole spectrum. They build it, they run it, the whole piece. >> You would think the competitive implications of this are huge. Without naming names, are you, at this point, able to discern patterns where organizations that are implementing this type of approach, are becoming more competitive, becoming more profitable, gaining share. Do we have enough evidence of that yet? >> Yes. Well, Gene, we were talking about Gene Kim earlier, and you can see, from a lot of the studies he has, that you'll see how much more effective and high-performance you're getting out of teams that are really embracing the best practices DevOps, and it is translating into financial results. So, you are seeing that bridge occur, but, part of what got me thinking about, is, what we were talking about earlier, the analytics that we've been exploring in the, in the team insights, and how the patterns you see, in how teams are interacting, and their code, and, you know, where are the core committers, the extended community, and extended community, the extended ring outside of that. You can begin to see patterns that are working well, patterns that are starting to have problems. It might actually be an architecture issue-- >> A self-healing concept too, if you think about it. This is actually taking it to like, social media has the same problem, on Twitter, runs with the same voice. You could have a zillion followers, and not have any influence, or have, you know, 100 followers and have a lot of influence, based on, that's no measure for that. You're getting at something that's more scoring-oriented, and analytical. That's interesting to me, I'm going to follow up on that, maybe another time. The question I want to ask you, 'cause I want to, I can't get it out of my mind, 'cause you mentioned the cloud-native, it's got me, kind of really, you know, riffing on this. We believe it's a multi-cloud world, right? And there's going to be a variety of clouds, not a winner take all, and they're all going to have differentiation, but having the traverse clouds is going to be really, really important. So, Kubernetes is kind of interesting to me, because you're looking at Kubernetes really kind of coming in and saying, hey, we could actually be a factor in orchestrating, and managing the sets of containers and micro services. And so, it's almost like a whole 'nother land-grab is going on around Kubernetes, because, it's so delicate. Can you share thoughts on that? Because, it's kind of nuanced, Kubernetes is, has got great traction in containers and micro services, but it's super-important. Why is it important, and why is it fragile, or is it fragile? In the sense of its importance, and not to be forked or tweaked. >> First, it's growing very rapidly. The use of containers for development and building, largely cloud-native micro service applications, is growing at a very rapid rate. And then, the ability to set-up these Kube clusters in different clouds, to be able to take advantage of the characteristics or services that are, are in those different clouds, including, you know, maybe you want to set-up a cluster near where your data is so you can have the processing local to that data, maybe you want to set-up clusters around certain security, or privacy, or regulatory policies. So, Kube is really providing, almost a platform-like layer for the containers, that is very robust. I wouldn't say it's fragile, but, with that flexibility, to setting that up, and where you want to setup that-- >> It allows customers to really figure out where to put workloads that matter. So, IoT would be a great use case for this. IoT, say, hey, you know what? This cloud is awesome at this and, put that app over there, and this one goes over here, 'cause it's got something over there that I like, but now, you need to have, I mean, is that kind of where, this is like, interoperability of networking in like, the 80s, in 90s, when that whole trend started booming is really its importance. >> Yes, yes-- >> Its openness. >> Well, the openness is critical. A lot of what we saw in distributed computing and the connectivity between clusters will be critical, but I do want to get to that point you mentioned on the openness; to me, openness is critical from a number of dimensions. One, certainly for inter-operability, and portability, but probably the most important is the rallying point for innovation, that you get these ecosystems, and with open technologies, which really is an open governance with open standards, you find a lot of creativity and innovation occurring within that base, and that, to me, is what really causes these environments to explode and take off. >> And if they can take that openness into the data level, then you're going to have a perfect storm of innovation, because now, you've got open source, which is thriving, and continues to be great, tier one by the way. >> And you're choosing to invest so much, and give back so much to the community. Not everybody does that, but you've made a business case for that. Why that strategy? I mean, it's IBM, you would think, you know, historically, IBM, very closed. But, you are almost overly-aggressive about your open source investments. >> Yeah. Not even sure it's historical, it dates back a long time, quite a while ago-- >> Yeah, that's true. >> Dave: You can go back, all the way to Linux. >> Yeah, Linux was the, they were the main player in Linux. >> You go back, obviously, the internet itself, TCP/IP, Linux, Java, Eclipse-- >> Track record's amazing. >> To me, all these industry breakthroughs, things that shape the industry are often, at its core, there were, at critical places, there was an open ecosystem, an open governance, open technology that really enabled it to just expand and grow at a tremendous rate. >> I think blockchain is perfect for you guys right now. A great example of, and in, might, people might be saying, oh, a little bit early, I think that bet is going to be playing out well. If you take the open source, and this whole digital value thing, very interesting. Well, I mean, final thought: what are you excited about right now? I mean, as an IBM Fellow, you get the canvas within the tech space, obviously, a lot to pull, it's kind of intoxicating these days. We kind of went down memory lane with some old ways, but, there's a ton of great new things happening. What are you excited about? I mean, what's getting you buzzed up about the current tech scene? >> The things that are really, I find fascinating and exciting now, is the different ways we're learning to apply AI, cognitive machine-learning into the different systems. We just, sort of, covering it just a little bit, in the DevOps space itself, but we're learning to apply it from the end of test, to understanding how we can predict where we have problematic code files, and how you would improve your test or skills, to the other spectrum of how is the community actually operating? Is the community healthy, is it growing? How are my projects and my teams working together? How healthy is that, are there issues that I have to start looking at? Do I have a design issue, an architecture issue, a squad issue? So, I can start doing that. This is all, we're learning how to take in big data and apply machine learning to this to get these types of insights. And to me, you know, that's just one spectrum of how we're applying it, but that's, to me, what's so exciting, is how we're applying it. You know, some of the examples that were shown with blockchain and cognitive, and in IoT, and AI. >> Dave is changing the game. The algorithms are coming out as more like libraries, not as custom stuff, and you've got the compute over the top. It's like, I wish I was 15 again, you know? What a great time to be in the tech industries, a computer scientist or any kind of science field right now. >> It is a great time. >> It's just a super time. Appreciate it, Dave, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Dave Lindquist, IBM Fellow, vice president of DevOps and the cloud at IBM, sharing his insight, great job. IBM's coverage continues here at day two, here on theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay with us for our wrap after this short break. (percussive tones)