(bright music) >> Well, hi everybody. John Walls here on theCUBE, continuing our coverage of AnsibleFest 2021 with Tom Anderson, the Vice President of Product Management at Red Hat. And Tom, you've been the answer, man, for theCUBE here over the last a week, 10 days or so. Third cube appearance, I hope we haven't worn you out. >> No, you haven't John, I love it, I love doing it. So that's great to have you have you at the event. >> Thank you for letting us be a part of that. It's been a lot of fun. Let's let's go and look at the event now. As far as big picture here, major takeaways that you think that have been talked about, that you think you'd like people, customers to go home with. If you will, though, a lot of this has been virtual obviously, but when I say go home, I made that figuratively, but what, what do you want people to remember and then apply to their businesses? >> Right. So being a product guy, I want to talk about products usually, right? So the big kind of product announcements from this year's event have been the rollout, and really, the next generation of the Ansible automation platform, which is really a rearchitecture turning it into a cloud native application an automation application itself that scales to our customer needs. So a lot of big announcements around that. And so what does that do for customers? That's really bringing them the automation platform that they can scale from the data center, to the cloud, to the Edge and everywhere in between, across a single platform with a single easy to use automation language. And then secondly, on that, as automation starts to shift left, we always talk about technology shifting left towards the developer, as automation is also shifting left towards the developer and other personas in an organization we're really happy about the developer tools and the tooling that we're providing to the customers with the new automation platform too, that brings development of content automation content. So the creation, the testing, the deployment and the management of that content across an enterprise far easier than it's ever been. So it's really kind of, it's a little bit about the democratization of automation. We see that shifting left, if you will. And I know I've said that already, but we see that shifting left of automation into other parts of the organization, beyond the domain experts, the network engineers or the storage experts, et cetera, pushing that automation out into the hands of other personas in the organization has been a big trend that we've seen and a lot of product announcements around that. So really excited about the product announcements in particular, but also the involvement and the engagement of our ecosystem, our upstream community. So important to our product and our success, our ecosystem partners, and obviously last but not least our customers and our users. >> So you hit a lot of big topics there. So let's talk about the Edge. You know, that seems to be a, you know, a fairly significant trend at this point, right? 'Cause trying to get the automation out there where the data besides, and that's where the apps are. Right? So where the data is, that's where things are happening out there on the Edge. So maybe just dive into that a little bit and about how you're trying to facilitate that need. >> Yeah. So a couple of trends around the Edge, obviously it's the architecture itself with lower capacity or lower capability devices and compute infrastructure at the Edge. And whether that's at the far edge with very low capacity devices, or even at near edge scenarios where you don't have, you know, data center, IT people out there to support those environments. So being able to get at those low capability, low capacity environments remotely Ansible is a really good fit for that because of our agentless architecture, the agentless architecture of Ansible itself allows you to drive automation out into the devices and into the environments where there isn't a high capacity infrastructure. And the other thing that the other theme that we've seen is one of the commonalities that no matter where the compute is taking place and the users are, there always has to be network. So we see a lot of network automation use cases out at the Edge and Ansible is, you know, the defacto network automation solution in the market. So we see a lot of our customers driving Ansible use cases out into their Edge devices. >> You know, you talk about development too, and just kind of this changing relationship between Ansible and DevOps and how that has certainly been maturing and seems to be really taking off right now. >> Yeah. So for, you know, what we've seen a lot of, as you know, is becoming frictionless, right? How do we take the friction out of the system that frees developers up to be more productive for organizations to be more agile, to roll out applications faster? How do we do that? We need to get access to the infrastructure and the resources that developers need. We need to get that access into their hands when they need it. And in our frictionless sort of way, right? So, you know, all of the old school, traditional ways of developers having to get infrastructure by opening a help desk ticket to get servers built for them and waiting for IT ops to build the servers and to deploy them and to send them back a message, all that is gone now. These, you know, subsystem owners, whether that's compute or cloud or network or storage, their ability to use Ansible to expose their resources for consumption by other personas, developers in this case, makes developers happy and more efficient because they can just use those automation playbooks, those Ansible playbooks to deploy the infrastructure that they need to develop, test and deploy their applications on. And the actual subsystem owners themselves can be assured that the usage of those environments is compliant with their standards because they've built and shared the automation with those developers to be able to consume when they want. So we're making both sides happy, agile, efficient developers and happy infrastructure owners, because they know that the governance and compliance around that system usage is on point with what they need and what they want. >> Yeah. It's a big win-win and a very good point. I always like it when we kind of get down to the nitty-gritty and talk about what a customer is really doing. Yeah. And because if we could talk about hypotheticals and trends and developing and maturity rates and all those kinds of things, but in terms of actual customers, you know, what people really are doing, what do you think have been a few of the plums that you'd like to make sure people were paying attention to? >> Yeah. I think from this year's event, I was really taken by the JP Morgan Chase presentation. And it really kind of fits into my idea of shifting left in the democratization of automation. They talked about, I think the number was around 7,000 people, associates inside that organization that are across 22 countries. So kind of global consumption of this. Building automation playbooks and sharing those across the organization. I mean, so gone are the days of, you know, very small teams of people doing, just automating the things that they do and it's grown so big. And, so pervasive now, I think JP Morgan Chase really kind of brings that out, tease that out, that kind of cultural impacts that's had on their organization, the efficiencies that have been able to draw off from that their ability to bring the developers and their operations teams together to be working as one. I think their story is really fantastic. And I think this is the second year. I think this is the second year that JP Morgan Chase has been presenting at Fest and this years session was fantastic. I really, really enjoyed that. So I would encourage, I would encourage anybody to go back and look at the recording of that session and there's game six groups, total other end of the spectrum, right? Financial services, JP Morgan Chase, global company to Gamesis, right? These people who are rolling out new games and need to be able to manage capacity really well. When a new game hits, right? Think about a new game hits and the type of demand and consumption there is for that game. And then the underlying infrastructure to support it. And Gamesis did a really great presentation around being able to scale out automation to scale up and down automation, to be able to spin up clusters and deploy infrastructure, to run their games on an as-needed basis. So kind of that business agility and how automation is driving that, or business agility is driving the need for automation in these organizations. So that that's just a couple of examples, but there was a good ones from another financial services that talked about the cultural impacts of automation, their idea of extreme automation. In fact, one of the sessions I interviewed Joe Mills, a gentlemen from this card services, financial services company, and he talked about extreme automation there and how they're using automation guilds in communities of practice in their organization to get over the cultural hurdles of adopting automation and sharing automation across an organization. >> Hm. So a wide array obviously of customer uses and all very effective, I guess, and, you know, and telling their own story. Somewhat related to that, and you, as you put it out there too, if you want to go back and look, these are really great case studies to take a look at. For those who, again, who maybe couldn't attend, or haven't had a chance to look at any of the sessions yet, what are some of the kinds of things that were discussed in terms of sessions to give somebody a flavor of what was discussed and maybe to tease them a little bit for next year, right? And just in case that you weren't able to participate and can't right now, there's always next year. So maybe if you could give us a little bit of flavor of that, too. >> Yeah. So we kind of break down the sessions a little bit into the more kind of technical sessions and then the sort of less technical sessions, let's put it that way. And on the technical session front, certainly a couple of sessions were really about getting started. Those are always popular with people new to Ansible. So there's the session that aired on the 29th, which has been recorded and you can rewatch it. That's getting started Q and A with the technical Ansible experts. That's a really, really great session 'cause you see that the types of questions that are being asked. So you know, you're not alone. If you're new to Ansible, the types of questions are probably the questions that you have as well. And then the, obviously the value of the tech Ansible experts who are answering this question. So that was a great session. And then for a lot of folks who may want to get involved in the community, the upstream community, there's a great session that was also on the 29th. And it was recorded for rewatching, around getting started with participation in the Ansible community and a live Q and A there. So the Ansible community, for those who don't know is a large, robust, vibrant, upstream community of users, of software companies, of all manners of people that are contributing and contributing upstream to the code and making Ansible a better solution for them and for everybody. So that's a great session. And then last but not least, almost always the most popular session is the roadmap sessions and Massimo Ferrari, gentleman on my team did a great session on the Ansible roadmap. So I do a search on roadmap in the session catalog, and you can see the recording of that. So that's always a big deal. >> Yeah, roadmaps were great, right? Because especially for newcomers, they want to know how I'm down here at 0.0. And, I've got a destination in mind, I want to go way out there. So how do I get there? So, to that point for somebody who is beginning their journey, and maybe they have, you know, they're automated with the ability to manually intervene, right? And now you've got to take the hands off the wheel and you're going to allow for full automation. So how, what's the message you want to get across to those people who maybe are going to lose that security blanket they've been hanging on to, you know, for a long time and you take the wheels off and go. >> No John, that's a great question. And that's usually a big apprehension of kind of full automation, which is, you know, that kind of turning over the reins, if you will, right to somebody else. If I'm the person who's responsible for this storage system, if I'm the person responsible for this network elements, these routers, these firewalls, whatever it might be, I'm really kind of freaked out about giving controls or access to those things, from a configuration standpoint, to people outside of my organization, who don't have the same level of expertise that I do, but here's the deal that in a well implemented well architected Ansible automation platform environment, you can control the type of automation that people do. Who does that against what managing that automation as code. So checking in, checking out, version control, deployment access. So there's a lot of controls that can be put in place. So it isn't just a free-for-all automated. Everybody automating everything. Organizations can roll out automation and have access to different kinds of automation, can control and manage what their organizations can use and see and do with Ansible. So there's lots of controls built-in for organizations to put in place and to make those subsystem owners give them confidence that how people are accessing their subsystems using Ansible automation can be controlled in a way that makes them comfortable and assures compliance and governance around those resources. >> Well, Tom, we appreciate the time. Once again, I know you've been a regular here on theCUBE over the course of the event. We'll give you a little bit of time off and let you get back to your day job, but we do appreciate that and I wish you success down the road. >> Thank you very much. And we'll see you again next year. >> You bet. Thank you, Tom Anderson, joining us Vice President of Product Management at Red Hat, talking about AnsibleFest, 2021. I'm John Walls, and you're watching theCUBE. (lively instrumental music)