>>Hello, welcome to the Cube here in Palo Alto, California. We're here for a preview of Ansible Fest 2022 this year in Chicago, in Person. And I'm here with Andreas. I've been on Craus, who's a senior manager for Ansible Technical Marketing at Red Hat. And just great to see you Cube alumni. Thanks for coming on and giving us a preview of what to expect at Ansible Fest. Thanks. >>No problem. Thanks for having us and thanks for everyone tuning in. >>You know, one of the things that's exciting this year is one, it's back in person from 2019 was the last in person Ansible Fest. Always a great event for folks doing it. Cloud native configuration management and automation, I think, and last year in our virtual event was the three things where automation, automation, automation kind of drove the point home. This year it's, it's more exciting than ever because if you look at the growth of Cloud Native, we're seeing a lot more traction in mainstream enterprises with Kubernetes. And obviously containers continue to grow with open source, powering everything under the coverage. So like this has like become such a whole nother inflection point this year more than ever. There's a focus on not just automation, but where the dots are gonna connect into the future. So I'd like to get your thoughts on what we're gonna expect this year at Ansible Fest. What's the themes? What do you, what do you see coming down the pike? What can people expect, >>People can really expect? Thanks. Thanks very much John. Really excited. So we're gonna see a lot of what we've seen before, right? So a little difference is from the previous onsite Ansel Fest is, I think we no longer have to say, you know, what's Ansible? We typically have had to say, you know, what is this Ansible thing? I don't know what this is. This is automation. I think we've gone beyond that and this is great. Ansible itself is now the defacto, what we believe is the de facto kind of automation language and Ansible automation platform is the defacto automation platform. So as you move into this year, we we're gonna be able to see, be able to really hone in on really having those beginners starting off much, much more quickly. But also those that have no and love Ansible for over the years to take that automation to the next level to, to new areas. Either new domains going beyond the data center, into the cloud, and then going beyond by all the partner certifications, integrations that we have. So it's a lot, it's just more of, of everything I think. So it's more for everyone all the time. So it's not, it's you, it's, it's no longer kind of a beginner's for everything, but we go all the way to kind of crawl, walk, run for this one. >>You know, it always surprises me every year, I'm always surprised by how great open source I remember every year. It's like, pinch me, This is amazing. If you're a developer right now, it's a good time to be coding because of open source growth is, is at an all time high, continues to grow, more projects are emerging. DevOps, which really came out of the ethos of the kind of the early days of the cloud and, and and scaling infrastructure was, was about infrastructure as code, which was the dream we all had in the late two thousands. If you remember right now that's happened. DevOps is now in the C I C D pipeline. Developers are shifting. Left cloud native hybrid actually now is a steady state and that's pretty well documented. What, what's next beyond infrastructures code? What's beyond the on premise cloud integration from a, from a, from a tech standpoint, what are you guys seeing around infrastructures, code, what's next and then what's beyond on premise? >>I think the big thing is scale, right? So we've always been able to kind of automate people, developers, as you said, DevOps, you can automate from your laptop, you can open up your laptop, download some open source Ansible and you know, automate your windows, your Linux, your network, no problem. But how do you actually operationalize that in an enterprise way across large teams, right? A global environment and then being able to like actually secure that, right? Security is such a big, sp a big piece of that now. So being able to actually apply automation securely in secure environments. So, and wrap all of that around cloud, right? So we've always been talking about a, you, you mentioned it on premises going into the cloud, right? So being able to operationalize in the cloud. So being able to automate cloud targets. So being able to automate aws, Azure GCP targets, but also running your automation on the cloud like say OpenShift. So being able to dynamically load load balance, create execution on demand for Ansible in OpenShift. So it's kind of hard and we, we hope that an Ansible fest will be able to kind of like demystify that from like when you hear, when you hear the word cloud and, and cloud native and hybrid cloud, it kind of goes in your head. We hope to kind of clear that up for folks at, at the fest. >>Certainly we're gonna talk about Super Cloud as well with the cube there. I wanna hear your thoughts real quick on the edge. You know, we gonna hear anything about the edge. This, this year, again, Edge has become hugely important, but yet it's not clear to a lot of people what that looks like. Are we gonna hear anything there? >>Absolutely. Edges is huge. And to some people I will say that when, when you say edge automation, it may not click to some folks, but if you were to say automating wireless access points in a branch office, you thinking, oh, okay, I can't now I know what you're talking about. Right? So a lot of people really may not have made the connection to what Edge Automation is because we, you know, maybe that hasn't been defined. And as we start moving into edge automation, we can start talking about extending, right? We're already talking about extending the data center, especially for network automation. So network automation no longer is in data center. You can now extend that out to the branch office to campus Wireless, right? And you can also extend that out into other areas such as industrial applications, right? If you wanna move a glue gun from one end of the warehouse to the other, you know, that has to be automated and we'll be able to be able to do that by means of some of the enhancements we made for that. >>What can customers and attendees who are gonna be there either in person and after remote hybrid expect us hear about Ansible's automation platform this year? What's gonna be some of the announcements? Can you tease a little bit out on what >>I can tease a little bit? Yeah. You know, day one's gonna be more of making me upleveling what you have today. I think you're gonna see some of the, the futures, right? A lot of the things around Edge, you'll hear something called event driven automation. So you, this is, this is very akin to maybe self-driving or self-healing or, you know, being able to automatically say event is triggered and then you can actually cause some automation to be spun up to actually remediate those things. So going beyond observability, right? Observability is great, but just observing problems is, is, you know, I can look at a million things wrong in my network, but if they're not being remediated, you know, it doesn't really mean much. So, you know, talking about event driven there is gonna be really hot. And then a lot of the other use cases in frameworks, you know, going beyond the configuration, I think, yeah, >>I think they develop things. Cool. And, and final question for you, because one of the things that last year we came away with was automation. What's that next automation at scale. Because remember, you know, we remember where we came from writing scripts, automating things from just basic scripting and, and configuration automation to full scale automation. That's become a big part and we see a lot of that in the cloud. Native conversations with containers and whatnot. How do you scale at, at, at, in the cloud with the cloud na hyperscalers. So again, the relationship with the hyperscalers and scale, what can we expect to hear there? >>Oh, everything from, so we'll be teasing out a little bit. You, you know that we have Ansible automation platform on Azure as a marketplace offering. We may be extending that to maybe some other hyperscalers. So making it super easy for customers or prospects to get automating quickly in their hyperscaler of choice, using their own means and, and, and methods and processes. And then going beyond that and ensuring security. So I mess in security again, how do you ensure that what you're in, what you're actually automating is part of like a security supply chain is part of your content or part of your playbooks and keeping things actually running well at scale, like you said, >>Okay, you got Azure, I'll put, I'll put my guessing hat on. There's only a few others in the pull from. That's awesome. Congratulations. And looking forward to the event, final word here. What's, what's, what do you see outcome at the end of the event? What's gonna, what's in your mind's eye? What's the, what's the outcome look like? >>Yeah, I, I just gotta do a shameless plug. I'm actually running the labs and workshops. So if you're in person or if you're not, you know, come check out the labs and workshops. We have four rooms. You can just camp out and just do hands on learning with workshop instructor led learnings or self-paced training. You can see me and all that. But I think the future learnings here is really trying to futureproof everyone's use cases. So actually, you know, you talk about ai, you talk about Cloud native, talking about other Red Hat products being, being part of that conversation with re and OpenShift, it's really a great time to, to be automating right now. >>And it's interesting. And the Ansible community that's well, well known. They all know each other and it's, it, I won't say niche, it's not niche anymore. It used to be one of those areas where super important for making things run now we need to take cloud and cloud scale. Horizontal scalability across multiple environments is kind of an Ansible thing, right? It's like you need to think about how to scale the Ansible concept. And I think that's the big exciting thing that I see with Cloud Native Andrews is this idea that, you know, what Ansible stood for back then now applies to almost all environments. So the automation, the scaling of, of, of configurations and tearing stuff down and standing things up with machines and software is just, I think, an incredible opportunity. And I think it operations is now in the developer's hands and data and security ops are front and center in, in all these conversations. And it's gonna be super exciting. Can't wait to, can't wait to hear. Okay. Thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it. Thanks for, for giving your opinion. >>All right. I appreciate it. Thank you very much for hosting us. See you and we'll see you there in Chicago. >>Okay. Andrew's been a creative senior manager and it's potential marketing to breaking it down, getting the preview on what's coming, expect to hear more about automation and how it's relevant at scale and, and all new things are happening with cloud native inflection point. We're living right now. So we'll see you there. Thanks for watching.