>> Narrator: Live from Austin, Texas, it's The Cube covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Linux Foundation, and The Cube's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone. Live here, The Cube's exclusive coverage in Austin, Texas. This is CloudNativeCon and KubeCon for Kubernetes Conference. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. My next two guests from Red Hat, Joe Brockmeier, senior evangelist, Linux Containers, Red Hat and Kimberly Craven, Director of Portfolio Marketing at Red Hat. Welcome to The Cube, good to see you guys. >> Thank you, good to see you, too. So I was saying at re:Invent last week that Red Hat's stamp of approval has always been in the enterprise. You guys are, you know, winning the enterprise, been there for years. But now, at Cloud Native, kind of things are coming together. You've got a lot of customers that have been, I won't say quietly going with Red Hat with OpenShift, and now with Kubernetes. Huge bet a few years ago. >> Mmhmm. >> Yep. >> Only two years ago. Kind of changed the game. >> Yeah, fortunately we made a strategic decision to replatform our own platform on Kubernetes and it was the right decision to make. So we've been lucky in that we've been able to, I'd say we've been able to invest in the right open source projects. So Joe, would you agree that over the years, I mean, starting with Linux. >> Yep. >> But in other technologies as well? >> Yeah, historically, I think we, not every, not 100% of the time, but a large enough percentage of the time, picked the right horse community wise. Open Stack, now Kubernetes, Linux-Colonel, obviously. I used to work for a company called LinuxMall and we sponsored these Linux pavilions. And I remember NetBSD guys telling me how Linux was doomed because it wasn't as elegant. >> Doomed, it sure didn't turn out that way. But certainly, the community model has changed. You're starting to see, you know, Dan Cohen, in his opening slide, actually kind of laid out the circle of innovation, project, products and profit. >> Joe: Yeah. >> And so now, it's okay to have profitability objectives as an outcome of great products. And so still bringing in the culture of innovation because the business market for this is pretty large. I see the number of people coming on board. The demand is pretty strong. >> Not just innovation, but I think, one of the important things about Kubernetes is that is has been a community project where it's a community of equals contributing to the project. And it's about each company bringing the right thing for the project, not the right thing necessarily just for that company, but the right thing for the overall project, which is really important. >> Timing's everything, right? I mean, as they say in life, but remember, all that FUD about past layers and infrastructures as a service, and again, the DevOps community was still growing. No one really talks about that anymore because people just want working software. >> Joe: Right. >> Right? So it's fun not to have those kind of conversations. Instead, the conversation's about how to orchestrate great workloads, how to onboard and accelerate more application developers. This is the narrative that we wanted a couple years ago. Now it's here. What are you guys doing at Red Hat to take that to the next level? >> Kimberly: So I'm going to defer to Joe for that one. >> Joe: Okay. To take that to the next level. First, before people can get to the next level, one thing I want to point out is that while everybody here is hip deep in Kubernetes and they're ready, there are a lot of companies out there that are still digesting virtualization and still digesting cloud. >> Kimberly: Right. >> Private or public, and so one of our key roles is actually to help them consume open-source software and get from Point A to Point B. So the role that we're really playing right now is about taking customers with their workloads today that are running on bare metal, that are running on virtualization, that are pet workloads, right? And getting those into the cloud and getting in those into Kubernetes and that sort of thing. So the next level for a lot of folks is actually getting up to speed to the things that were announced today. >> Right. >> Well the question I want to ask, that I want to get this on the record, 'cause it's important to get the definition, what does Kubernetes mean to the enterprise? For us in Cloud Native, we understand what it is, we get it, but to the enterprise customer, what does Kubernetes mean to them? So I would say, based on the customer conversations that we've had, it's all about getting your workloads to the cloud and being more cloud native much more quickly. So that's the end goal for adopting containers and adopting Kubernetes. It's all about getting to be in a position where you can migrate your workloads to the cloud but also develop new on the cloud much more quickly than you could before. So it's about automating, it's about all of the processes behind that, if you will. >> Joe, comment? >> I agree with everything Kimberly said. I would also just add I think it's really about kind of an almost an end-stage of software packaging, which is something that Red Hat has been doing for 20+ years, is figuring out how do we take goodness of software, open-source software, and get it into a consumable format? First it was RPM, then it was YUM, now it's containers, now it's orchestrated containers that are, you know, able to be worked on with service mesh and all these other wonderful things, cloud native storage. It's basically about taking that software and making it scale. >> Yeah, I mean, yours is a service mesh. So let's take it to the next level of customer conversation. I love this stuff, I'm going to the cloud as soon as possible. I got some stuff in the public stuff now, I got a lot of on-premise stuff activity, I love hybrid cloud. So I got a lot of different use cases. I got some bare metal, I got some hybrid cloud and I got some public cloud. Is this where the OpenShift fits in? I mean, in that environment of a customer conversation, what's the current state of the art for Red Hat to engage that customer? >> So organizations, they're taking inventory of everything that they have today. So they're looking at what do they have on bare metal today, what do they have in virtualization, what different workloads do they have and where does it make sense to deploy them both financially and from an advancement perspective? Because some workloads don't have to be, they don't have to be advanced as quickly. You don't have to make additional updates. But there are other workloads that are moving much more quickly. And one of the things that Red Hat does and where we help our customers, especially with OpenShift, is we allow them to deploy those workloads across, whether they're going to on-premises with a bare metal if you say, or as well as virtualization, private cloud, potentially a mixture of multicloud environment where they have some workloads going to Google, some workloads going to AWS, and some going to Azure. It's being able to do that consistently, that OpenShift for guidance. >> Is that a common use case right now? Is that the number one use case, this hybrid? >> So when you say that, the hybrid cloud, it's not, it's a combination of multiple use cases. People aren't necessarily looking just yet to take the same workload and move it such that it's spanning multiple clouds, but they want to have that flexibility so that if they choose to go to a certain public cloud, and it becomes it's not cost-effective for them to do so anymore, they want to be able to take that workload and move it. And that's what we're working towards. >> Joe, I got to ask about OpenShift because, you know, we've been following you guys since the Open Stack days and now with the formation of this, seeing nice lines of sight of value proposition. What's going on with OpenShift? We're hearing a lot of good customer wins, a lot of people are using it. I heard a comment in the hallway saying that OpenShift has more customers than most of these vendors here combined. I'm not sure I believe that, that might have been just kind of chatter, but is that true or can you share the success? Because it's been on a tear. What are some of the OpenShift success points? >> Kimberly: Well-- >> So is it true there are more customers than all everyone else combined? >> I'd like to say so, I mean-- >> John: Pretty close or-- >> You were at Red Hat Summit this past year back in the May timeframe and we had many OpenShift customers that were on stage. I mean, it was-- >> John: You got lots. >> Yeah, we had to turn sessions away from customers because we didn't have enough room for them. >> So one of the things we actually haven't gotten to highlight yet at this event, Red Hat does, at a lot of these shows, ahead of the show, it's called OpenShift Commons, maybe you can give our audience a little bit of what goes into that. 'Cause all the container shows, the Cloud Native shows, you know, OpenShift has been there. >> Yeah, with OpenShift Commons, it's a great way for the community to collaborate around OpenShift specifically. It's, whether it be with our ISVs, working with our ISVs on different plugins to extend OpenShift as well as our customers to be able to provide us with feedback in terms of what they're looking for. And then we take that to the community. For example, Clayton was a top contributor. That was announced yesterday. >> Yes, Clayton got an award offered for that on stage, yeah. >> Yeah, and in essence, our customers are providing feedback to us directly in OpenShift Commons and in other forums. And that allows us to steer the community more effectively to meet their needs. >> I just want to add it's not a two-way conversation with Commons. It's also, you know, I was also there on Tuesday when we did Commons and we had Tellus, for example, telling their story to the other customers in the room. And so they're not just telling us, like, hey, this works for us, this doesn't work. They're telling each other and they're sharing successes, which is part of the wonder of open sourcing community. It's not just about, you know, you can have, I don't want to use an example, you can have a two-way conversation with any vendor that's taking your money. How many vendors are bringing you together to talk to your other customers? You have to have a lot of confidence, I think, in people being happy with your solution to build something out like that. >> Yeah, and experience, too. You guys had the experience. >> Yeah, you mentioned, we were right about that time, we'd been there a number of years. I feel the open source community is a little bit better at allowing those customers to kind of come forward. Because not only are they using it, they're usually contributing to some of these technologies. Some traditional shows, you know, getting a customer to get up on stage is pretty challenging. Any comments on that? >> Well it's funny because I think it's getting much easier, moving forward, for customers to participate in the communities, as you'll see with Netflix, for example. They were up on stage earlier and talking about the contributions that they're also making to the community. I think that it's much easier than it was even, I'd say, 5-10 years ago. With that said, there are a lot of customers that want help in terms of creating additional functionality in the community where they might have something that's, perhaps, not quite ready, not quite good enough, that we help to shepherd. >> Is there a profile of customer that's adopting Kubernetes? I mean, I've seen a lot of media coverage, obviously Netflix is on AWS. ACHB on stage today. Is it coincidental that there'd be two large big media online kind of companies, or-- >> Well, it's funny you should ask that because we're conducting a research project and we recently got some data back where we, in essence, sent out a survey to customers and non-customers to see where their adoption was. What we're finding is financial services, the media, communications organization, government, and even healthcare, to some extent, are taking a look at and adopting. I'd say that, based on the adoption curve, what's funny to note is, with government, government started looking, on average, at containers three years ago, whereas with financial services, they started to get more heavily invested, now this is in general, if you're looking at the median, two years ago. With that said, I think that financial services is actually adopting containers more quickly than government is. >> I'd love to see the data on that survey because we're always doing kind of probing, anecdotal kind of stirrup holes, friends and guests of The Cube. And it's the trend, from our standpoint, is that it seems that anywhere that there's been this transformation opportunity. >> Kimberly: Mmhmm. >> I mean, look at government. Who would've though public sector could be so fast and change? So public sector, media and entertainment, people with their modernizing seems to be where the action is. But financial services is always going to be on the IT dollar spend. But like, I mean, I'm really surprised at how fast public sector is evolving. >> And what's interesting about it, too, is also the industries that are predominantly concerned with security. Security and performance are very important to financial services and to government and to communications. And it's interesting how quickly this technology is being adopted with those considerations. >> Joe, one of the things coming into the show, I listened to some previews and they're saying, you know, we're not even going to talk about containers of the show. Of course, there's containers kind of underneath. Maybe speak a little bit about that dynamic. Red Hat, you know, so heavily involved. You know, of course Linux containers, you know, underneath there. Compare and contrast to kind of what we're kind of doing here in the Kubernetes and Cloud Native space. >> Yeah, so it really isn't about the individual container anymore than five years ago it was about the individual RPM. The container runtime and the ability to spin up a container is table stakes. And so that is no longer really where the value is. Same as like, hypervisors in cloud. Like, the real value is not in the hypervisor. It's around that, it's the ecosystem around it and the ability to do it. So yeah, I mean, we're still talking about, it's funny, when I have conversations, not here, but in other places, the parlance is still to say containers when they really mean, you know, like Kubernetes and orchestration, the whole schmear. But yeah, it's not where the value and the action is these days. >> Where's the Red Hat situation with the people now? Because we've seen, we've noticed, that you guys have really kind of continued to evolve as a company. Obviously, I mean, or in the early days of Red Hat, open source wasn't tier one. You guys made it tier one as a culture, that's well-documented. But then there's a whole new Red Hat mojo going on now. OpenShift, seeing you bringing that same principles. Talk about what's going on in the company now. We've seen a lot of smart people continuing to do the Red Hat thing. What is Red Hat now in the marketplace? The same old Red Hat? What's different, what's the same? 'Cause you guys are doing really well. >> Kimberly: Mmhmm. >> What's it like there? >> I think, I've been at Red Hat for about six years and I would say that the culture has continued to evolve since I joined. One of the things that first attracted me about it was that there are a lot of smart people that work at Red Hat and it's a very collaborative culture. It's a culture that's based on meritocracy and the best ideas truly win. So very similar to the way that OpenSource projects are run or should be run, for the good OpenSource projects, it's very much about getting people together, hearing what everyone has to say, and making sure that the right ideas are the ones that move forward. >> John: Surely they attract great people, too. >> Yeah. >> To build on that, in this industry there's so much kind of hype, boom and bust. On the outside, you look at it, I mean, from a financial standpoint, Red Hat's one of the most consistent performers out there. You know, quarter after quarter, Kim talks about the growth. So you know, I'm not asking you to talk about the financials but, you know, worth a show. Nobody here can keep up with all the changes. So you know, just, when you talk about all these projects and everything, Red Hat, can you keep up with the changes? Or is it just that you've got so many people and contribute so many places? >> We're working on it and I think, I mean, the nice thing about it is that everybody's very passionate about all of those changes that are happening. And we like change, oddly enough, we embrace it. It's interesting, but that's one of the parts of being at Red Hat. And I'd say, I mean, I would think that that's something that's inherent to us. >> Well, I mean, our corporate mission, part of our corporate mission is to be the catalyst for change and communities. And we, you know, I've worked at a couple of larger companies and this is the only one where I feel like if I don't agree with something I can send an email directly to Jim and say, "I don't agree with this and I think we should do something different." >> And he'll respond within four hours. >> And Jim will respond unless he's on a plane. >> Yeah, he'll respond and you know, even if they don't agree, which is impossible, everybody always agrees with me. (group laughs) But even if they don't agree, you know, they engage honestly and respectfully, and that's super important in this kind of industry. If you can't do that, you can't run with open source. >> Joe, Kimberly, thanks for coming on The Cube, and continued success and thanks for all the Red Hat contribution. You guys are doing a great job in the community. Continue to appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Red Hat, here on The Cube, continuing to do the Red Hat thing. Red Hat, stamp of approval from the enterprise. Certainly well-respected and the leader inside The Cube here at the CloudNativeCon and KubeCon for KubernetesCon, not Cube. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. We'll be back with more after this short break. (upbeat music)