(cheerful music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of AnsibleFest 2021, with Red Hat. Topic of this power panel is the future of automation, we've got a great lineup of CUBE alumni, Joe Fitzgerald, vice president, general manager of the Red Hat business unit, thanks for coming on, Tom Anderson, vice president, product manager of Red Hat, and Alessandro Perilli, the senior director of product market at Red, all good CUBE alumni. Distinct power panel, Joe we'll start out with you, what have you seen in automation game right now, 'cause it continues to evolve. I mean you can't go to an event, a virtual event, or read anything online without hearing AI automation, automation hybrid, automation hybrid hybrid hybrid hybrid, I mean automation is the top conversation in almost all verticals. What do you see happening right now? >> Yeah, it's sort of amazing, you know? Automation is quite fashionable these days, as you pointed out. Automation's always been on the radar of a lot of enterprises, and I think it was always perceived as sort of like that, an efficiency, a task model thing, that people did. Now automation is, if you believe some of the analysts, it's up to a board room imperative in some cases. So we are seeing with our customers that the level of complexity they're dealing with, particularly exaggerated by what's gone past year and a half in the world, is putting a tremendous amount of pressure, attention and importance on automation. So automation's definitely one of the busiest places to be right now. >> What's the big change this year, though? I mean we love the automation conversation, we had it last year a lot too, as well. What's the change, what's the trend right now that's driving this next level automation conversation with customers? >> Well, I'll ask my colleagues to comment on that in a second, but, the challenges here with automation, is people are constrained now, they can't access facilities as easy as they used to be able to. They still need to go fast, some businesses have had to expand dramatically, and introduce new services to handle all sorts of new scenarios, they've had to deploy things faster. Security, not a week goes by you don't read about something going on regarding security and breaches and hacking and things like that, so they're trying to secure things as fast as possible, right, and deploy critical fixes and patches and things like that. So there's just tremendous amount of activity, that's really been exaggerated by what's gone on over the past year. >> And all of this is being compounded with a nature of increasing complexity, that we're seeing in the architecture, explosion microservices, the adoption en masse of containers, and the adoption of multiple clouds for most customers around the world. So really, the extension of the IT environment, especially for large enterprises, enormous for any team, no matter how big it is, so how scale it is, to really go after and look for all the systems, and then the complexity of the architectures, is enormous within that IT environment. It is impossible to scale the applications and to scale the infrastructure, and not scale the IT operations. And so automation becomes really a way to scale IT operations, rather than just keep repeating the same steps over and over, in an attempt to simplify, or to reduce costs. It's well beyond that at this point. >> That's a great point. Tom, what's your reaction to this, because Alessandro brings up a good point, developers are going faster than ever before. The changes of speed and complexity have gone up, so the demand for the IT and/or security groups, or anyone, to be faster, not weeks, minutes. We're talking about a complete time shift here. >> Yeah, so I talk to a lot of customers, and what I keep hearing again and again from them is kind of two things, which is, a need for skills, and reskilling existing staff. When Alessandro talks about the complexity and the scale, think about all the different new tools, new environments, new platforms that these employees and these associates are being exposed to and expected to be able to handle. So, a real, not a skill shortage, but a stress on the skills of the organization. And then secondly, really, our customers are talking to us about the culture in the environment itself, the culture of collaboration, the culture of automation, and the kind of impact that has in our organization, the way teams are now expected to work together, to share information, to share automation, to push, you know, we talk about shifting left in a lot of things now in IT, automation is now shifting left, pushing automation and access to subsystems, IT subsystems and resources, into the hands of people who traditionally haven't had direct access to those resources. So really kind of shift in skills, and a shift in culture I see. >> Ah, the culture. (indistinct), I want to come back to that culture thing, but I want to ask you specifically on that point, do you think automation users still view automation as just repeating and simplifying processes that they already are doing? You've heard the term, "Done it three times, automate it." Is that definition changing and evolving, what's your thoughts? >> Yeah, IT is really changing, going from the traditional, "I'm a network engineer and I use a command line to update my devices I'm responsible for, the config devices, and then I decide to write a playbook using a really cool product like Ansible to drive automation into my daily tasks." And then it comes up to exposing, again, exposing that subsystem I'm responsible for, whatever it is, storage, network, compute, whatever it is, exposing that op so other people can consume it without me being involved, right? So that's a real change in a mindset, and tooling, and approach, that I'm going to expose that op to a set of workflows, business workflows, that drive automation throughout an organization. So that's a real kind of evolution of automation, (indistinct) first, and that's usually focused mostly on day zero, provisioning of a new service. Now we see a lot more focus, or a lot of additional focus on day two operations. How do I automate my day two operations to make them a lot more efficient, as my scale and complexity grows? How do I take the human element out of operating this on a day to day basis? >> So you're saying basically, if I understand you correctly, the system's architecture view, or mindset, around automation, it moves from "Hey, I'm going to use," and Ansible by the way is great for "Hey, I want to automate something, I'm doing a lot," that's cool. But you're looking at it differently. If I understand you correctly, you're saying the automation has to be a system view, meaning you create the rules of the road so that automation can happen at the front lines of the CICD pipeline. You mentioned shift left, is that the difference, is that kind of what's happening here, that's beyond just doing automation, because you can automate it, so you've done that, this is like the next level, is that what you're getting at? >> It is, and we joke about it a little bit, crushing silos, right? Breaking down silos, and again, I keep talking about culture, it really is important, tools are important and technology's important, but the culture's super important, and trying to think of that thing from a systems mindset, of sort of workflows and orchestration of a business process that touches IT components, and how do I automate that and expose that to that workflow, without a human having to touch it, right? Yet still enforce my security protocols, my performance expectations, my compliance stuff, all of that stuff still needs to be enforced, and that's where repeatable automation comes in, of being able to expose this stuff up into these system-level workflows. >> And then there is another element to this (indistinct), I think it's really important to attach to this, the element of speed. We talk about complexity, we talk about scale, but then there is this emerging third dimension, as I call it, that is the speed. And the speed has a number of different articulation, it's the speed when you're thinking about how quickly you need to deliver the application. If you're in a very competitive environment, think about web scale startups for example, or companies in an emerging market, and then you have the speed in terms of reacting to a cybersecurity attack, which Tom just mentioned. And then you have the third kind of speed I'm thinking about right now, which is the increasing amount of artificial intelligence, so an algorithmic kind of operation that is taking place in the organization. For now it's still very limited, but it's not unthinkable that going forward, the operations will be driven, or at least assisted by artificial intelligence. This speed, just like the scale and the complexity we mentioned before, are impossible to be addressed by a single team, and so automation becomes indispensable. >> Yeah, that's a great point, I want to just double click on that, I mean both Tom and Joe were just talking about system, they used the word system. In a subsystem, if one is going faster than the other, to your point, there's a bottleneck there. So if the IT group or security groups are going to take time to approve things, they're not putting rules to the road together to automate and help developers be faster, because look, it's clear, we've been reporting on this in theCUBE, cloud developers are fast. They're moving really fast with code. And so what happens is, if they're going to shift left, that means they're going to be at the point of coding to set policies on security. So, that's going to put pressure on the other subsystems to go faster, so they have to then expose rules of the road, or I'm just making that up, but policy base, or have some systems thinking. They can't just be the old way of saying "No, slow it down." So this is a cultural thing, I think Joe, you brought up culture, Alessandro, you brought up culture. Is that still there? That speed, fast team here and a slow team here? Is that still around, or people getting faster on both sides? And I'm kind of talking about IT, generally speaking, they tend to be slower than the developers. >> Well, just a couple comments, first of all, you heard silos, you heard complexity, you heard speed, talked about shift left. Let me sort of maybe tie those together, right? What's happened to date is every silo has their own set of tooling, right? And so one silo might move very fast, with a very private set of tools, or network management, or security, or whatever, right? And if you think about it, one of the number one skills gaps right now is for automation people. But if an automation person has to learn 17 different tools, 'cause I'm running on three public clouds, I'm on-premise, edge, and I'm doing things to move network storage, compute, security, all sorts of different systems, the tooling is so complicated, right, that I end up with a bunch of specialists. Which can only do one or two things, because they don't know the other domains and they don't know the skills. One of the things we've seen from our customers, I think this is a fundamental shift in automation, is that what we've done with Ansible in particular is, we actually adopted Ansible because of its simplicity. It's actually human-readable, you don't have to be a hardcore programmer to write automation. So that allows the emergence of citizen creators of automation. There's not like a group in some ivory tower that now can make automation and they do it for the masses. Individuals can now use Ansible to create automation. Going cross-domain, Ansible automation touches networks, security, storage, compute, cloud, edge, Linux, Windows, containers, traditional, ITSM, it touches so many systems, that basically what you have is you have a set of power tooling, in Ansible, that allows you now to share automation across teams, 'cause they speak the same language, right? And that's how you go faster. If every silo is fast, but when you have to go inter-silo you slow down, or have to open a ticket, or have some (indistinct) mismatch, it causes delays, errors, and exposures. >> I think that is a very key point, I mean that delay of opening up tickets, not being responsive, Alessandro, you put up machine learning and AI, I mean if you think about what that could do from an automation standpoint, if you can publish the HIPAA rules for your healthcare, you can just traverse that with a bot, right? I mean this is the new... This just saves so much time, why even open up a ticket? So if you can shift left and do the security, and there's kind of rules there, this is a trend, how do you make that happen, how do you bust the silos, and I guess that's the question I'd love to get everyone to react to, because that implies some sort of horizontally scalable control plane. How does someone do that in an architectural way, that doesn't really kind of, maybe break everything, or make the (indistinct) go into a cultural sideways situation? >> Maybe I can jump in, and grab this one, and then maybe ask Alessandro to weigh in afterwards, but, what we've seen and what you'll see some of the speakers at AnsibleFest this year talk about, from a cultural perspective is bringing teams together across automation guilds, JPMC calls it a community of practice, where they're bringing hundreds and thousands of individuals in the organization together virtually, into these teams that share best practices, and processes and automation that they've created. Secondly, and this is a little bit of a shameless plug for Ansible, which is having a common language, a common automation language across these teams, so that sharing becomes obviously a lot easier when you're using the same language. And then thirdly, what we see a lot now is people treating automation as code. Storing that, and get version managing and version controlling and checking in, checking out, really thinking of automation differently from an individual writing a script, to this being infrastructure or whatever my subsystem is, managed it and automated it as code, and thinking of themselves as people responsible for code. >> These are all great points. I think that on top of all these things, there is an additional element which is change management. You cannot count on technology alone to change something that is purely cultural, as we kept saying during this video right now. So, I believe that a key element to win, to succeed in an automation project, is to couple the technology, great technology, easy to understand, able to become the common language as Tom just said, with an effort in change management that starts from the top. It's something you don't see very often because a technology vendor rarely works with a more consulting firm, but it's definitely an area that I think would be very interesting to explore for our customers. >> That's a great point on the change management, but let me ask you, what do you think it needs to make automation more frictionless for users, what do you see that needs to happen, Alessandro? >> I think there are at least a couple of elements that need to change. The first one is that, the effort that we're seeing right now in the industry, to further democratize the capability to automate has to go one notch further. And by that I mean, implementing cell service provisioning portals and ways for automatically execute an automation workflow that already exists, so that an end user, somebody that works in the line of business, and doesn't understand necessarily what the automation workflow, the script is doing, still able to use it, to consume it when it, she or he needs to use it. This is the first element, and then the second element that is definitely more ambitious, is about the language, about how do I actually write the automation workflow? This is a key problem. It's true that some automation engines and some workflows have done, historically speaking, a better job than others, in simplifying the way we write automation workflows, and definitely this is much simpler than writing code with a programming language, and it's simpler than writing automation compared to a tool that we use 10, 15 years ago. But still, there is a certain amount of complexity, because you need to understand how to write in a way that the automation framework understands, and you need even before that, you need to express what you want to achieve, and in a way that the automation engine understands. So, I'm thinking that going forward we'll start to see artificial intelligence being applied to this problem, in a way that's very similar to what OpenAI Microsoft are doing with Codex, the capability that is a model that allows a person to write in plain English through a comment in code, to translate that comment into actual code, taken from GitHub or through the machine learning process that's been done. I'm really thinking that going forward, we will start to see some effort in the same direction, but applied to automation. What if the AI could assist us, not replace us, in writing the automation workflow so that more people are capable to translating what they want to achieve, in a way that is automatable? >> So you're saying the language, making it easy to program, or write, or create. Being a creator of automation. And then having that be available as code, with other code, so there's kind of this new paradigm of automating the automation. >> In a sense, this is absolutely true, yes. >> In addition to that, John, I think there's another dimension here which is often overlooked, which we do spend a lot of time on. It's one thing to have things like Alessandro mentioned, that are front edge in terms of helping you write code, but you want to know something? In big organizations, a lot of times what we find is, someone's already written the code that you need. You know what the problem is? You don't know about it, you can't find it, you can't share it and you can't collaborate on it, so the best code is something that somebody's already invested the time to write, test, burn in, certify, what if they could share it, and what if people could find it, and then reuse it? Right, everybody's talking about low code, no code, well, reuse is the best, right? Because you've already invested expertise into doing it. So we've spent a lot of time working with our customers based on their feedback, on building the tools necessary for them to share automation, to collaborate on it, certify it, and also to create that supply chain from partners who create integrations and interfaces to their systems, and to be able to share that content through the supply chain out to our customers and have them be able to share automation across very large globally distributed organizations. Very powerful. >> That's a powerful point, I mean reuse, leverage there, is phenomenal. Discovery engine's got to be built. You got to know, I mean someone's got to build a search engine for the code. "Hey code, who's written some code?" But just a whole 'nother mindset, so this brings up my next question for you guys, 'cause this is really, we're teasing out the biggest things coming next in automation. These are all great points, they're all about the future, where will the puck be, let's skate to where the puck will be, but it's computer science and automation that's being democratized and opened up more, so it's, what do you guys think is the biggest thing coming next for automation? >> Joe, you want to go next? >> Sure. Sure. Yeah, I'll take it. So we're getting a glimpse of that with a number of customers right now that we're working with that are doing things around concepts like self-healing infrastructures. Well what the heck is that? Basically, it's tying event systems, and AI, which is looking at what's going on in an environment, and deciding that something is broken, sub-optimal, spending too much, there's some issue that needs to be dealt with. In the old days, it was, that system would stop with opening a ticket, dispatch some people who were either manually or semi-automated go fix their whatever. Now people are connecting these systems and saying "Wait a minute. I've got all this rich data coming through my eventing systems. I can make some sense out of it with AI or machine learning. Then I can drive automation, I just eliminated a whole bunch of people, time, exposure, cost, everything else." So I think that, sort of a ventureman automation is going to be huge. I'm going to argue that every single system in the world that uses AI, the result of that's going to be, I want to go do something, I want to change, optimize my move, secure, stop, start, relocate, how's that going to get done? It's going to get done with automation. >> And what Joe just said is really highly successful in the consumer space. If you think about solutions like If This Then That, or Zapier for example, those are examples of event-driven automation. They've been in the consumer space for a long time, and they are wildly popular to the point that there are dozens of clones and competitors. The enterprise space, it didn't adopt the same approach so far, but we start to see event bridges, and event hubs that can really help with this. And this really connects to the previous point, at this point I'm a broken record, which is about the speed and the complexity. If the environment is so spread out, so complex, and it goes all the way to the edge, and all these events take place at a neck-breaking pace, the only way for you is to tie the automation workflows that you have written, to a trigger, an event that takes place at some point, according to your logic. >> Tom, what are your thoughts? >> Yeah, last but not least on that kind of thread, which is sort of the architectures as we get out to the edge, what does it take to automate things at the edge? We thought there was a big jump from data center to cloud, and now when you start extending that out to the edge, am I going to need a new automation platform to handle those edge devices? Will I need a new language, will I need a new team, or can I connect these things together using a common platform to develop the automate at the edge? And I think that's where we see some of our customers moving now, which is automating those edge environments which have become critical to their business. >> Awesome, I want to ask one final question while I've got you guys here in this power panel, great insights here. Operational complexity was mentioned, skills gap was mentioned earlier, I want to ask you guys about the organizational behavior and dynamic going on with this change. Automation, hybrid, multi-cloud, all happening. When you start getting into speed of application development for the modern app, opensource where things are opening up and things are going to be democratized with automation and code and writing automation, and scaling that, you're going to have a cultural battle that's happening, and we're kind of seeing it play out in real time. DevOps has kind of gone and been successful, and we're seeing cloud-native bring new innovation, people are refactoring their business models with cloud technologies, now the edge is here, so this idea of speed, shifting left, from a developer standpoint, is putting pressure on the old, incumbent systems, like the security group, or the IT group that's still holding onto their ticketing system, and they're slower, they're getting requests, and the developer's like "Okay, go faster, I want this done faster." So we're seeing departments reorganizing. What do you guys see, 'cause Red Hat, you guys have been in there, all these big accounts for the generation of this modern era. What's the cultural dynamics happening, and what can companies do to be successful, to get to the next level? >> So I think for us, John, we certainly see it and we experience it, across thousands of customers, and what we've done as an organization is put together adoption journeys, a consulting engagement for our customers around an automation adoption journey, and that isn't just about the technology, it's all throughout that technology, it's about those cultural things, thinking differently about the way I automate and the way I share, and the way I do these tasks. So it's as much about cultural and process as it is about technology. And our customers are asking us for that help. Red Hat, you have thousands of customers that are using this product, surely you can come and tell us how we can achieve more with automation, how can we break down these silos, how can we move faster, and so we've put together these offerings, both directly as well as with our partners, to try and help these customers kind of get over that cultural hump. >> Awesome. Anyone else want to react to the cultural shift and dynamics and how it can play out in a positive way? >> Yeah, I think that it's a huge issue. We always talk about people, processes, and technology. Well the people issue's a really big deal here. We're seeing customers, huge organizations, with really capable teams building apps and services and infrastructures, saying "Help me think about automation in a new way." The old days, it was "Hey, I'm thinking about it as a cost savings thing." Yeah, there's still cost savings in there. To your point, John, now they're talking about speed, and security, and things like that. How fast, zero day exploits, now it's like zero hour exploits. How fast can I think about securing something? You know, time to heal, time to secure, time to optimize, so people are asking us, "What are the best practices? What is the best way to look at what I've got, my automation deficits," used to have tech deficits, now you got automation deficits, right? "What do I need to do culturally?" It's very similar to what happened with DevOps, right? Getting teams to get together and think about it differently and holistically, that same sort of transition is happening, and we're helping customers do that, 'cause we're talking to a lot of them where you've got the scholars have been through it. >> Awesome. Alessandro, your thoughts on this issue. >> I think that what Tom and Joe just said is going to further aggravate, it's going to happen more and more going forward, and there is a reason for that. And this connects back with the skill problem, that we discussed before. In the last 10 years, I've seen growing demand for developers to become experts in a lot of areas that have nothing to do with development, code development. They had to become experts in cloud infrastructures, they had to become experts in security because, you've probably heard this many times, security's everybody's responsibility. Now they've been asked to become experts in artificial intelligence, transforming their title into something like ML engineer. The amount of skills and disciplines that they need to master, alone, by themself, would require a lifetime of work. And we're asking human beings to get better and better at all of these things, and all of the best practice. It's absolutely impossible. And so the only way for them, yeah, five jobs in one, six jobs in one, right? Probably for the same seller, and the only way that these people can execute the best practice, enforce the best practice, if the best practices are encoded in automation workflow, not necessarily written by them, but by somebody else, and execute them at the right time, the right context, and for the right reason. >> It's like the five tool player in baseball, you got to do five different things, I mean this is, you got to do AI, you got to do machine learning, you got to have access to all the data, you got to do all these different things. This is the future of automation, and automation's critical. I've never heard that term, automation deficit or automation debt, we used to talk about tech debt, but I think automation is so important because the only way to go fast is to have automation, kind of at the center of it. This is a huge, huge topic. Thank you very much for coming on, power panel on the future of automation, Joe, Tom, Alessandro from Red Hat, thanks for coming on, everyone, really appreciate the insight, great conversation. >> Thanks, John. >> 'Kay, this is theCUBE's coverage of AnsibleFest 2021 virtual. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, your host, thanks for watching. (calm music)

(joyful music) >> According to storage guru, Fred Moore, 60 to 80% of all stored data is archival data, leading to the need for what he calls the infinite archive. And in this world, digital customers require inexpensive access to archive data that's protected, it's got to be available, durable, it's got to be able to scale and also has to support the governance and compliance edicts of the organizations. Welcome to this next session of the AWS Storage Day with theCUBE. I'm your host, Dave Vellante. We're going to dig into the topic of archiving and digitally preserving data and we're joined by Joe Fitzgerald, who's the general manager of Amazon S3 Glacier. Joe, welcome to the program. >> Hey, Dave. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. >> Okay, I remember early last decade, AWS announced Glacier, it got a lot of buzz. And since then you've evolved your archival storage services, strategy and offerings. First question: why should customers archive their data in AWS? >> That's a great question. I think Amazon S3 Glacier is a great place for customers to archive data. And I think the preface that you gave, I think, covers a lot of the reasons why customers are looking to archive data on the cloud. We're finding a lot of customers have a lot of data. And if you think about it, most of the world's data is cold by nature. It's not data that you're accessing all the time. So if you don't have an archival story as part of your data strategy, I think you're missing out on a cost savings opportunity. So one of the reasons we're finding customers looking to move data to S3 Glacier is because of cost. With Glacier Deep Archive, we have an industry-leading price point of a dollar per terabyte per month. I think another reason that we're finding customers wanting to move data to the cloud, into Glacier, is because of the security, durability and availability that we offer. Instead of having to worry about some of the most valuable data that your company has and worrying about that being in a tape library that doesn't get access very often on premises or offsite in a data locker that you don't really have access to, and we offer the best story in terms of the durability and security and availability of that data. And I think the other reason that we're finding customers wanting to move data to S3 Glacier is just the flexibility and agility that having your data in the cloud offers. A lot of the data, you can put it in Deep Archive and have it sit there and not access it but then if you have some sort of event that you want to access that data, you can get that back very quickly, as well as put the power the rest of the AWS offerings, whether that's our compute offerings, our machine learning and analytics offerings. So you just have unmatched flexibility, cost, and durability of your data. So we're finding a lot of customers looking to optimize their business by moving their archive data to the cloud. >> So let's stick on the business case for a minute. You nailed the cost side of the equation. Clearly, you mentioned several of the benefits, but for those customers that may not be leaning in to archive data, how do they think about the cost-benefit analysis when you talk to customers, what are you hearing from them, the ones that have used your services to archive data, what are the benefits that they're getting? >> It's a great question. I think we find customers fall into a few different camps and use cases and one thing that we recommend as a starting point is if you have a lot of data and you're not really familiar with your access patterns, like what part of the data is warm, what part is cold? We offer a storage class called S3 intelligent tiering. And what that storage class does is it optimizes the placement of that data and the cost of that data based on the access patterns. So if it's data that is accessed very regularly, it'll sit in one of the warmer storage tiers. If it's accessed infrequently, it'll move down into the infrequent access tier or to the archive or deep archive access tiers. So it's a great way for customers who are struggling to think about archive, because it's not something that every customer thinks about everyday, to get automatic cost savings. And then for customers who have either larger amounts of data or better understand the access patterns, like some of the industries that we're seeing, like autonomous vehicles, they might generate tons of training data from running the autonomous vehicles. And they know, okay, this data, we're not actively using it, but it's also very valuable. They don't want to throw it away. They'll choose to move that data into an archive tier. So a lot of it comes down to the degree to which you're able to easily understand the access pattern of the data to figure out which storage class and which archive storage class maps best to your use case. >> I get it, so if you add that deep archive tier, you automagically get the benefit, thanks to the intelligent tiering. What about industry patterns? I mean, obviously, highly regulated industries have compliance issues and you have data intensive industries are going to potentially have this because they want to lower costs, but do you see any patterns emerging? I mean every industry needs this, but are there any industries that are getting more bang from the buck that you see? >> I would say every industry definitely has archived data. So we have customers in every vertical segment. I think some of the ones that we're definitely seeing more activity from would be media and entertainment customers are a great fit for archive. If you think about even digital native studios who are generating very high definition footage and they take all that footage, they produce the movie, but they have a lot of original data that they might reuse, that you remaster, director's cut, to use later, they're finding archive is a great fit for that. So they're able to use S3 Standard for their active production, but when they're done finishing a movie or production, they can save all that valuable original footage and move it in deep archive and just know that it's going to be there whenever they might need to use it. Another use case, we're staying in media, entertainment, similar to that and this is a good use case for S3 Glacier is if you have sports footage from like the '60s and then there's some sort of breaking news event about some athlete that you want to be able to cut a shot for the six o'clock news, with S3 Glacier and expedited retrievals, you're able to get that data back in a couple of minutes and that way you have the benefit of very low cost archive storage, but being able to get the immediacy of having some of that data back when you need it. So that's just some of the examples that we're seeing in terms of how customers are using archives. >> I love that example because the prevailing wisdom is the older data is, the less valuable it is, but if you can pull a clip up of Babe Ruth at the right time, even though it's a little grainy, wow, that's huge value for the-- >> We're finding like lots of customers that they've retained this data, they haven't known why they're going to need it, they just intrinsically know this data is really valuable, we might need it. And then as they look for new opportunities and they're like, hey, we're going to remaster this. And they've gone through a lot of digital transformation. So we're seeing companies have decades of original material moving into the cloud. We're also seeing fairly nascent startups who are also just generating lots of archive data. So it's just one of the many use cases we see from our customers love Glacier. >> Data hoarders heaven. I love it. Okay, Joe. Let's wrap up. Give us your closing thoughts, how you see the future of this business, where you want to take your business for your customers. >> Mostly, we just really want to help customers optimize their storage and realize the potential of their data. So for a lot of customers, that really just comes down to knowing that S3 glacier is a great and trusted place for their data, and that they're able to meet their compliance and regulatory needs, but for a lot of other customers, they're looking to transform their business and reinvent themselves as they move to the cloud. And I think we're just excited by a lot of emerging use cases and being able to find that flexibility of having very low cost storage, as well as being able to get access to that data and hook it up into the other AWS services and really realize the potential of their data. >> 100%, we've seen it over the decades, cost drops and use cases explode. Thank you, Joe. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks a lot, Dave. It's been great being here. >> All right, keep it right there for more storage and data insights. You're watching AWS Storage Day on theCUBE. (tranquil music)

(upbeat music) >> According to storage guru, Fred Moore, 60 to 80% of all stored data is archival data leading to the need for what he calls the infinite archive, In this world digital customers require inexpensive access to archive data that's protected it's got to be available, durable, it's got to be able to scale and also has to support the governance and compliance edicts of the organizations. Welcome to this next session of the AWS storage day with The Cube. I'm your host, Dave Vellante. We're going to dig into the topic of archiving and digitally preserving data and we're joined by Joe Fitzgerald, who is the general manager of Amazon S3 Glacier, Joe. Welcome to the program. >> Hey Dave, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, I remember early last decade, AWS announced Glacier, it got a lot of buzz, and since then you've evolved your archival storage services, strategy and offerings. First question. Why should customers archive their data in AWS? >> That's a great question. I think Amazon S3 Glacier is a great place for customers to archive data and I think the preface that you gave, I think covers a lot of the reasons why customers are looking to archive data on the cloud. We're finding a lot of customers have a lot of data. And if you think about it, most of the world's data is cold by nature. It's not data that you're accessing all the time. So if you don't have an archival story as part of your data strategy, I think you're missing out on a cost savings opportunity. So one of the reasons we're finding customers looking to move data S3 glacier is because of cost with Glacier Deep archive we have an industry leading price point of a dollar per terabyte per month. I think another reason that we're finding customers wanting to move data to the cloud into glacier is because of the security, durability, and availability that we offer. Instead of having to worry about some of the most valuable data that your company has and worrying about that being in a tape library that doesn't get accessed very often on premises or offsite in a, in a data locker that you don't really have access to. And we offer the best story in terms of the durability and security and availability of that data. And I think the other reason that we're finding customers wanting to move data to S3 Glacier is just the flexibility and agility that having your data in the cloud offers. A lot of the data, you can put it in deep archive and have it sit there and not access it, but then if you have, you know, some sort of event that you want to access that data, you can get that back very quickly, as well as put to power the rest of the AWS offerings, whether that's our compute offerings, or our machine learning and analytics offerings. So you just have like unmatched, you know, flexibility, cost, and durability of your data. So we're finding a lot of customers looking to optimize their business by moving their archive data to the cloud. >> Let's stick on the business case for a minute. I mean, you kind of nailed the cost side of the equation. Clearly you mentioned several of the benefits, but, but for those customers that may not be leaning in to, to, to archive data, how do they think about the cost benefit analysis when you talk to customers, what are you hearing from them? The ones that have used your services to archive data, what are the benefits that they're getting? >> It's a great question. I think we find customers fall into a few different, you know, camps in use cases. And one thing that we recommend as a starting point is if you have a lot of data and you're not really familiar with your access patterns, like which what, what part of the data is warm, what part is cold, we offer a storage class called S3 intelligent tiering. And what that storage class does is it optimizes the placement of that data and the cost of that data based on the access patterns. So if, if it's data that is accessed very regularly, it'll sit in one of the warmer storage tiers. If it's, accessed infrequently, it'll move down into the infrequent access tier or into the archive or deep archive access tiers. So it's a great way for customers who are struggling to think about archive, because it's not something that every customer thinks about every day to get on automatic cost savings. And then for customers who have, you know, either larger amounts of data or, or better understand the access patterns, like, you know, some of the industries that we're seeing like in, you know, autonomous vehicles, you know, they, they might have, they might generate like tons of training data from, from, you know, from running the autonomous vehicles. And they kind of know, okay, this data it's, it's, we're not actively using it, but it's also very valuable. They don't want to throw it away, they'll choose to move that data into an archive tier. So a lot of it kind of comes down to the degree to which you're able to easily understand the access pattern of the data to figure out which storage class and which archive storage class match best to your use case. >> I get it, so if you add that deep archive tier, you auto-magically get the benefit thanks to the intelligent tiering. What about industry patterns? I mean, obviously highly regulated industries have compliance issues. You know,, data intensive industries are going to potentially have this because they want to lower lower costs, but do you see any patterns emerging? I mean, every industry kind of needs this, but, but are there any industries that are getting more bang from the buck that, that you see? >> I would say every industry definitely has archived data. So we have, we have customers in every vertical segment. I think some of the ones that we're definitely seeing more activity from would be, you know, media and entertainment customers are a great fit for archive. If you think about, you know, even like digital native studios who are, you know, generate, you know, very high definition footage and, you know, they take all that footage, they produce the movie, but they have a lot of original data that they, you know, they, they might reuse. You know, remaster director's cut or, you know, to use later. They're finding archive is a great fit for that. So they're able to use S3 standard for their active production, but when they're done finishing a movie or production, they can save all that valuable original footage and move it into deep archive and just know that it's going to be there whenever they might need to use it. Another use case for staying in media entertainment, you know, kind of similar to that. And this is a good use case for S3 Glacier is if, if you have like sports footage from like the '60s, and then, you know, there's like some sort of breaking news event about some athlete that you want to be able to cut a shot for the six o'clock news, with S3 Glacier and expedited retrievals, you're able to kind of get like that, you know, that data back in a couple of minutes and that way you have the benefit of like very low cost archive storage, but being able to get the immediacy of having some of that data back when you need it. So, that's just some of the examples that we're seeing in terms of how customers are using archives. >> I love that example because, you know, the, the prevailing wisdom is the older, you know, data is the less valuable it is, but if you can pull a clip up of, you know, Babe Ruth at the right time, even though it's a little grainy, wow. That's huge value for the-- >> Yeah, I mean, we're, we're finding like lots of customers that, you know, they've retained this data, they haven't known why they're going to need it. They just sort of intrinsically know this data is really valuable and, you know, we might need it. And then as they, you know, they look for new opportunities and they're like, hey, you know, we're, we're going to remaster this and they they've gone through a lot of digital transformation. So we're seeing companies have, you know, decades of original material moving to the cloud where we're also seeing, you know, fairly new startups who are also just generating lots of archive data. So it's just, you know, one of the many use cases we see from our customers who love Glacier. >> Data hoarder's heaven, I love it. Okay, Joe, let's wrap up, give us your closing thoughts, how you see the future of this business, where you want to take, take your, your business for your customers. >> I think mostly we, we just really want to help customers optimize their storage and realize the potential of their data. So for a lot of customers that really just comes down to knowing that S3 Glacier is a great and trusted place for their data, and that they're able to kind of meet their compliance and regulatory needs, but for, you know, a lot of other customers, they're, they're looking to kind of transform their business and reinvent themselves as they move to the cloud, and I think we're just excited by a lot of emerging use cases, and, you know, being able to find that flexibility of having like very low cost storage, as well as being able to get access to that data and, hook it up into the other AWS services and really realize the potential of their data. >> 100%, I mean, we've seen it over the decades, cost drops and use cases explode. Thank you, Joe. Thanks so much for coming on The Cube. >> Thanks a lot, Dave, it's been great being here. >> All right keep it right there for more storage and data insights. You're watching AWS Storage Day on The Cube. (upbeat music)

(joyful music) >> According to storage guru, Fred Moore, 60 to 80% of all stored data is archival data, leading to the need for what he calls the infinite archive. And in this world, digital customers require inexpensive access to archive data that's protected, it's got to be available, durable, it's got to be able to scale and also has to support the governance and compliance edicts of the organizations. Welcome to this next session of the AWS Storage Day with theCUBE. I'm your host, Dave Vellante. We're going to dig into the topic of archiving and digitally preserving data and we're joined by Joe Fitzgerald, who's the general manager of Amazon S3 Glacier. Joe, welcome to the program. >> Hey, Dave. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. >> Okay, I remember early last decade, AWS announced Glacier, it got a lot of buzz. And since then you've evolved your archival storage services, strategy and offerings. First question: why should customers archive their data in AWS? >> That's a great question. I think Amazon S3 Glacier is a great place for customers to archive data. And I think the preface that you gave, I think, covers a lot of the reasons why customers are looking to archive data on the cloud. We're finding a lot of customers have a lot of data. And if you think about it, most of the world's data is cold by nature. It's not data that you're accessing all the time. So if you don't have an archival story as part of your data strategy, I think you're missing out on a cost savings opportunity. So one of the reasons we're finding customers looking to move data to S3 Glacier is because of cost. With Glacier Deep Archive, we have an industry-leading price point of a dollar per terabyte per month. I think another reason that we're finding customers wanting to move data to the cloud, into Glacier, is because of the security, durability and availability that we offer. Instead of having to worry about some of the most valuable data that your company has and worrying about that being in a tape library that doesn't get access very often on premises or offsite in a data locker that you don't really have access to, and we offer the best story in terms of the durability and security and availability of that data. And I think the other reason that we're finding customers wanting to move data to S3 Glacier is just the flexibility and agility that having your data in the cloud offers. A lot of the data, you can put it in Deep Archive and have it sit there and not access it but then if you have some sort of event that you want to access that data, you can get that back very quickly, as well as put the power the rest of the AWS offerings, whether that's our compute offerings, our machine learning and analytics offerings. So you just have unmatched flexibility, cost, and durability of your data. So we're finding a lot of customers looking to optimize their business by moving their archive data to the cloud. >> So let's stick on the business case for a minute. You nailed the cost side of the equation. Clearly, you mentioned several of the benefits, but for those customers that may not be leaning in to archive data, how do they think about the cost-benefit analysis when you talk to customers, what are you hearing from them, the ones that have used your services to archive data, what are the benefits that they're getting? >> It's a great question. I think we find customers fall into a few different camps and use cases and one thing that we recommend as a starting point is if you have a lot of data and you're not really familiar with your access patterns, like what part of the data is warm, what part is cold? We offer a storage class called S3 intelligent tiering. And what that storage class does is it optimizes the placement of that data and the cost of that data based on the access patterns. So if it's data that is accessed very regularly, it'll sit in one of the warmer storage tiers. If it's accessed infrequently, it'll move down into the infrequent access tier or to the archive or deep archive access tiers. So it's a great way for customers who are struggling to think about archive, because it's not something that every customer thinks about everyday, to get automatic cost savings. And then for customers who have either larger amounts of data or better understand the access patterns, like some of the industries that we're seeing, like autonomous vehicles, they might generate tons of training data from running the autonomous vehicles. And they know, okay, this data, we're not actively using it, but it's also very valuable. They don't want to throw it away. They'll choose to move that data into an archive tier. So a lot of it comes down to the degree to which you're able to easily understand the access pattern of the data to figure out which storage class and which archive storage class maps best to your use case. >> I get it, so if you add that deep archive tier, you automagically get the benefit, thanks to the intelligent tiering. What about industry patterns? I mean, obviously, highly regulated industries have compliance issues and you have data intensive industries are going to potentially have this because they want to lower costs, but do you see any patterns emerging? I mean every industry needs this, but are there any industries that are getting more bang from the buck that you see? >> I would say every industry definitely has archived data. So we have customers in every vertical segment. I think some of the ones that we're definitely seeing more activity from would be media and entertainment customers are a great fit for archive. If you think about even digital native studios who are generating very high definition footage and they take all that footage, they produce the movie, but they have a lot of original data that they might reuse, that you remaster, director's cut, to use later, they're finding archive is a great fit for that. So they're able to use S3 Standard for their active production, but when they're done finishing a movie or production, they can save all that valuable original footage and move it in deep archive and just know that it's going to be there whenever they might need to use it. Another use case, we're staying in media, entertainment, similar to that and this is a good use case for S3 Glacier is if you have sports footage from like the '60s and then there's some sort of breaking news event about some athlete that you want to be able to cut a shot for the six o'clock news, with S3 Glacier and expedited retrievals, you're able to get that data back in a couple of minutes and that way you have the benefit of very low cost archive storage, but being able to get the immediacy of having some of that data back when you need it. So that's just some of the examples that we're seeing in terms of how customers are using archives. >> I love that example because the prevailing wisdom is the older data is, the less valuable it is, but if you can pull a clip up of Babe Ruth at the right time, even though it's a little grainy, wow, that's huge value for the-- >> We're finding like lots of customers that they've retained this data, they haven't known why they're going to need it, they just intrinsically know this data is really valuable, we might need it. And then as they look for new opportunities and they're like, hey, we're going to remaster this. And they've gone through a lot of digital transformation. So we're seeing companies have decades of original material moving into the cloud. We're also seeing fairly nascent startups who are also just generating lots of archive data. So it's just one of the many use cases we see from our customers love Glacier. >> Data hoarders heaven. I love it. Okay, Joe. Let's wrap up. Give us your closing thoughts, how you see the future of this business, where you want to take your business for your customers. >> Mostly, we just really want to help customers optimize their storage and realize the potential of their data. So for a lot of customers, that really just comes down to knowing that S3 glacier is a great and trusted place for their data, and that they're able to meet their compliance and regulatory needs, but for a lot of other customers, they're looking to transform their business and reinvent themselves as they move to the cloud. And I think we're just excited by a lot of emerging use cases and being able to find that flexibility of having very low cost storage, as well as being able to get access to that data and hook it up into the other AWS services and really realize the potential of their data. >> 100%, we've seen it over the decades, cost drops and use cases explode. Thank you, Joe. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks a lot, Dave. It's been great being here. >> All right, keep it right there for more storage and data insights. You're watching AWS Storage Day on theCUBE. (tranquil music)

(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.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AnsibleFest 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. >> The ascendancy of massive clouds underscored the limits of human labor. People, they simply don't scale at the pace of today's technology. And this trend created an automation mandate for IT which has been further accentuated by the pandemic. The world is witnessing the build-out of a massively distributed system that comprises on-prem apps, public clouds and edge computing. The challenge we face is how to go from managing things you can see and touch to cost effectively managing, securing and scaling these vast systems. It requires an automation first mindset. Hello, everyone. This is Dave Vellante and welcome back to AnsibleFest 2020. We have a great panel to wrap up this show. With me are our three excellent guests and CUBE alums. Ashesh Badani is the Senior Vice President of Cloud Platforms at Red Hat. Ashesh, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, likewise. Thanks for having me on again, Dave. >> Stefanie Chiras is Vice President and General Manager of the RHEL Business Unit and my sports buddy. Stefanie, glad to see you back in the New England area. I knew you'd be back. >> Yeah, good to see you, Dave. Thanks for having us today. >> You're very welcome. And then finally, Joe Fitzgerald, longtime CUBE alum, Vice President and General Manager of the Management Business Unit at Red Hat. Joe, good to see you. >> Hey, Dave, good to be here with you. >> Ashesh, I'm going to start with you. Lay out the big picture for us. So how do you see this evolution to what we sometimes talk about as hybrid cloud, but really truly a hybrid cloud environment across these three platforms that I just talked about? >> Yeah, let me start off by echoing something that most of your viewers have probably heard in the past. There's always this notion about developers, developers, developers. And you know, that still holds true. We aren't going away from that anymore. Developers are the new kingmakers. But increasingly, as the scope and complexity of applications and services that are deployed in this heterogeneous environment increases, it's more and more about automation, automation, automation. In the times we live in today, even, you know, before dealing with the crises that, you know, we have, just the sheer magnitude of requirements that are being placed on enterprises and expectations from customers require us to be more and more focused on automating tasks which humans just can't keep up with. So you know, as we look forward, this conversation here today, you know, what Ansible's doing, you know, is squarely aimed at dealing with this complexity that we all face. >> So Stefanie, I wonder if you could talk about what it's going to take to implement what I call this true hybrid cloud, this connection and management of this environment. RHEL is obviously a key piece of that. That's going to be your business unit, but take us through your thoughts there. >> Yeah, so I'm kind of building on what Ashesh said. When we look at this hybrid cloud world, right, which now hybrid is much more than it was considered five years ago. It used to be hybrid was on-prem versus off-prem. Now, hybrid translates to many layers in the stack. It can be VMs hybrid with containers. It can be on-prem with off-prem and clearly with edge involved, as well. Whenever you start to require the ability to bridge across these, that's where we focus on having a platform that allows you to access sort of all of those and be able to deploy your applications in a simple way. When I look at what customers require, it's all about speed of deploying applications, right, build, deploy and run your applications. It's about stability, which is clearly where we're focused on RHEL being able to provide that stability across multiple types of hybrid deployment models. And third is all about scale. It is absolutely all about scale and that's across multiple ranges in hybrid, be it on-prem, off-prem, edge and that's where all of this automation comes in, so to me, it's really about where do you make those strategic decisions that allow you to choose, right, for the flexibility that you need and still be able to deploy applications with speed, have that stability, resiliency, and be able to scale. >> So Joe, let's talk about your swim lane and it's weird to even use that term, right? 'Cause as Stefanie just said, we're kind of breaking down all these silos that we talk in terms of platform, but how do you see this evolving, and specifically, what's the contribution from a management perspective? >> Right, so Stefanie and Ashesh talked about sort of speed, scale and complexity. Right, people are trying to deploy things faster or larger scale, and oh, by the way, keep everything highly available and secure. That's a challenge, right? And so, you know, interestingly enough, Red Hat, about five years ago, we recognized that automation was going to be a problem as people were moving into open hybrid clouds, which we've been working with our customers for years on. And so we acquired this small company called Ansible, which had some really early emerging technology, all open source, right, to do automation. And what we've done over the past five years is we've really amplified that automation and amplified the innovation in that community to be able to provide automation across a wide array of domains that you need to automate, right, and to be able to plug that in to all the different processes that people need in order to be able to go faster, but to track, manage, secure and govern these kind of environments. So we made this bet years ago and it's paying off for Red Hat in very big ways. >> I mean, no doubt about it. I mean, when you guys bought Ansible, so it wasn't clear that it was going to be the clear leader. It is now. I mean, it's pulled ahead of Chef, Puppet. You saw, you know, VMware bought Salt, but I mean, Ansible very clearly has, based on our surveys, the greatest market momentum. We're going to talk about that. I know some of the other analysts have chimed in on this, but let me come back to this notion of on-prem and cloud and edge and this is complicated. I mean, the edge, it's kind of its own island, isn't it? I mean, you got the IT and the OT schism, so maybe you could talk a little bit about how you see those worlds coming together, the cloud, the on-prem, the edge. Maybe Stefanie, you can start. >> Yeah, I think the magic, Dave, is going to happen when it's not its own island, right, as we start to see this world driven by data cause the spread of a data center to be really dis-aggregated and allow that compute to move out closer to the data, the magic happens when it doesn't feel like an island, right, that's the beauty and the promise of hybrid. So when you start to look at what can you provide that is consistent that serves as a single language that you can talk to from on-prem, off-prem and edge, you know, it all comes down to, for us, having a platform that you can build once and deploy across all of those, but the real delicacy with edge is there are some different deployment models. I think that comes into deployment space and we're clearly getting feedback from customers. We're working on some capabilities where edge requires some different deployment models in the ways you update, et cetera, and thanks to all of you out there who are working with us upstream in order to deliver that. And I think the second place where it's unique is in this ability to manage and automate out at the edge, but our goal is certainly at our platform levels, whether it be on RHEL, whether it be on OpenShift to provide that consistent platform that allows you that ease of deployment, then you got to manage and automate it and that's where the whole Ansible and the ecosystem really plays in. You need that ecosystem and that's always what I love about AnsibleFest is this community comes together and it's a vibrant community, for sure. >> Well, I mean, Ashesh, you guys are betting big on this and I often think of the cloud is just this one big cloud. You got the on-prem cloud, you got the public clouds. Edge becomes just an extension of that cloud. Is that how you think about it and what is it actually going to take to make that edge not an island? >> Yeah, great point, Dave, and that's exactly how we think about it. We've always thought about our vision of the cloud as being a platform and abstraction that spans all the underlying infrastructure that the user can take advantage of, so if it happens to reside in a data center, some in a private cloud running off a data center, more increasingly in the public cloud setting, and as Stefanie called out, we're also starting to see edge deployments come in. We're seeing, you know, big build-outs in the work we're doing with telecom providers from a 5G perspective that's helping drive that. We're seeing, if you will, IOT-like opportunities with, let's say, the automotive sector or some in the retail sector, as well. And so this fabric, if you will, needs to span this entire set of deployment that a customer will take advantage of. And Joe started touching on this a little bit, right, with this notion of the speed, scale and complexity, so we see this platform needing to expand to all these footprints that customers are using. At the same time, the requirements that they have, even when they're going out the edge, is the same with regard to what they see in the data center and the public cloud, so putting all that together really is our sweet spot. That's our focus. And to the point you're making, Dave, that's where we're making a huge bet across all of Red Hat. >> So I mentioned, you know, some of our research and I do these breaking analysis segments every week and recently I was digging into cloud and specifically was interested in hybrid and multi. And you know, hybrid been I think pretty well understood for awhile. Multi I think was a lot of, you know, a lot of talk, but it's becoming real and the data really shows that. It shows OpenShift and Ansible have momentum. I mentioned that before. Yeah, you know, obviously VMware is there, but clearly Red Hat is well positioned specifically in multicloud and hybrid. And I know some of the other analyst firms have picked up on this. What are you guys seeing in the market? Maybe Joe, you can chime in and Ashesh, you can maybe add some color. >> Yeah, so you know, there's a lot of fashion, right, around hybrid and multicloud today, so every vendor is jumping on with multicloud storing. And you know, a lot of the vendors' strategies are, pick my solution and vertically use my stuff in the public cloud on-premise, maybe even at the edge, right, and you'll be fine. And you know, obviously customers don't like lock-in. They like to be able to take advantage of the best services, availability, security, different things that are available in each of these different clouds, right? So there is a strong preference for hybrid and multicloud. Red Hat is sort of the Switzerland of hybrid and multicloud because we enable you to run your workloads across all these different substrates, whether it's in public clouds, multiple, right, into the data center and physical, virtual, bare metal, out to the edge and edge is not a single homogeneous, you know, set of hardware or even implementation. It varies a lot by vertical, so you have a lot of diversity, right? And so Red Hat is really good at helping provide the platforms like OpenShift and RHEL that are going to provide that consistency across those different environments or also in the case of Ansible to provide automation that's going to match the physics of management and automation that are required across each of those different environments. Trust me, managing or automating something at the edge and with very small footprint of some device across the constraint network is very, very different than managing things in a public cloud or in a data center and that's where I think Red Hat is really focused and that's our sweet spot, helping people manage those environments. >> And Ashesh, you guys have obviously put a lot of effort there. If you could maybe comment. >> Yeah, I was just going to say, Dave, I'll add just really quickly to what Joe said. He said it well. But the thing I will add is the way for us to succeed here is to follow the user, follow the customer. Right, instead of us just coming out with regard to what we believe the path to be, you know, we're really kind of working closely with the actual customers that we have. So for example, recently been working with a large water utility in Italy, but they're thinking about, you know, the world that they live in and how can they go off and, you know, have kiosks that are spread throughout Italy, able to provide reports with regard to the quality of the water that's available, as well as other services to all their citizens. But it's really interesting use case for us to go off and pursue because in some sense, you can ask yourself, well, is that public cloud? Are they going to take advantage of those services? Is that, you know, private cloud? Is that data center, is that IOT, is that edge? At a certain point in time, what you've got to think about is, well, we've got to provide integrated end-to-end solution that spans all of these different worlds, and so as long as I think we keep that focus, as long as we make sure our North Star is really what the user's trying to do, what problem they're trying to solve, I think we'll come out just fine on the other side of this. >> So I'd love to get all your thoughts, all three of you, on just what's going on in containers, generally, Kubernetes, specifically. I mean, everybody knows it's a hot space and the data shows that it is maturing, but it's amazing to me how much momentum it still has. I mean, it's like the new shiny toy, but it's everywhere and so it's able to sort of maintain that velocity and it's really becoming the go-to cloud native development platform, so the question is how is Red Hat, you know, helping your customers connect OpenShift to the rest of their IT infrastructure, platforms, their processes, the tools. I mean, who wants to start? I'd love to hear from all three of you. Ashesh, why don't you kick it off and then we'll just go left to right. >> So Dave, we've spoken to you and to folks the CUBE, as well, other for many years on this. We've made a huge investment in the Kubernetes market and been one of the earliest to do that and we continue to believe in the promise that it delivers to users, this notion of being able to have an environment that customers can use regardless of the underlying choices that they make. Here's an extremely powerful one, it's truly an open source, right? This is key to, you know, what we do. Increasingly, what we're working on is to ensure that one, if you make a commitment to Kubernetes and increasingly we see lots of customers around the world doing that, that we ensure that we're working closely, that our entire portfolio helps support that. So if you're going to make a choice with regard to Kubernetes base deployment, we help support you running it yourself wherever it is that you choose to run it, we help support you whether you choose to have us manage on your behalf and then also make sure we're providing an entire portfolio of services, both within Red Hat as well as from third parties so that you have the most productive, integrated experience possible. >> Okay, and Stefanie, loved your point of view on this, and Joe, I'd love to understand how you're bridging kind of the Ansible and Kubernetes communities, but Stefanie, why don't you chime in first? >> Yeah, I'll quickly add to what Ashesh said and talked about well on really the promise and the value of containers, but particularly from a RHEL perspective, we have taken all our capabilities and knowledge in the Linux space and we have taken that to apply it to OpenShift, right, because Kubernetes and containers is just another way to deploy Linux, so making sure that that underpinning is stable, secure and resilient and tied to an ecosystem, right? An ecosystem of various architectures, an ecosystem of ISVs and tooling, right? We've pulled that together and everything we've done in Linux for, you know, over decades now at Red Hat and we've put that into that customer experience around OpenShift to deploy containers, so we've really built, it has been a portfolio-wide effort, as Ashesh alluded to, and of course, it passes over to Ansible as well with Joe's portfolio. >> Yeah, we talked about this upfront, Joe. The communities are so crucial, so how are you bridging those Ansible and Kubernetes communities? What's your thought on that? >> Well, a quick note about those communities. So you know, OpenShift is built on Kubernetes and a number of other projects. Kubernetes is number seven in the top 10 open source projects based on the number of contributors. Turns out Ansible is number nine, right? So if you think about it, these are two incredibly robust communities, right? On the one hand, building the container platform in Kubernetes and in the other around Ansible and automation. It turns out that as the need for this digital acceleration and building these container-based applications comes along, there's a lot of other things that have to be done when you deploy container-based applications, whether it's infrastructure automation, right, to expand and manage and automate the infrastructure that you're running your container-based applications on, creating more clusters, you know, configuring storage, network, you know, counts, things like that, but also connecting to other systems in the environment that need to be integrated with around, you know, ITSM or systems of record, change management, inventory, cost, things like that, so what we've done is we've integrated Ansible, right, in a very powerful way with OpenShift through our advanced cluster management capability, which allows us to provide an easy way to instrument Ansible during critical points, whether it's you're deploying new clusters out there or you're deploying a new version of an application or a new application for the first time, whether you're checking policy, right, to ensure that, you know, the thing is secure and that, you know, you can govern these environments, right, that you're relying on. So we've really now tied together two sort of de facto standards, OpenShift built on Kubernetes and a number of other projects and then Ansible, or Red Hat, has taken this innovation in the community and created these certified content collections, platforms and capabilities that people can actually build and rely on and know that it's going to work. >> Ashesh, I mean, Red Hat has earned the right, really, to play in both the cloud native world and of course the traditional infrastructure world, but I'm interested in what you're seeing there, how you're bringing those two worlds together. Are they still, you know, largely separate? Are you seeing traditional IT? I mean, you're certainly seeing them lean in to more and more cloud native, but what are you guys doing specifically to kind of bring those worlds together? >> Yeah, increasingly it's really hard to be able to separate out those worlds, right? So in the past, we used to call it shadow IT. There really is no shadow IT anymore, right? This is IT. So we've embraced that completely. You know, our take on that is to say there are certain applications that are going to be appropriate for being run in a data center a certain way. There are certain other workloads that'll find their way appropriate for the public cloud. We want to make sure we're meeting them across, but what we want to do is constantly introduce technologies to help support the choices customers make. What do I mean by that? Let me give a couple examples. One is, you know, we can say customers have VMs that are based out in specific environments and they can only run as VMs. That code can't be containerized for a variety of reasons, right? You know, hard to re-architect that, don't have the funds, you know, have certain security compliance reasons. Well, what if we could take those VMs and then have them be run in containers in a native fashion? Wouldn't that be extremely powerful value proposition to run containers and then VMs as containers sort of side by side with Kubernetes orchestrating them all. So that's a capability we call open source virtualization. We've introduced that and made that generally available within our platform. Another one, which I think Joe starting to touch on a little bit here, is both around this notion of Ansible, as well as advanced cluster management. And say, once technologies like Ansible are familiar to our customers, how about if we find ways to introduce things like the operator framework to help support people's use of Ansible and introduce technologies like advanced cluster management, which allows for us to say, well, regardless of where you run your clusters, whether you run your Kubernetes clusters on premise, you run them in the cloud, right, we can imagine a consistent fashion and manage, you know, health and policy and compliance of applications across that entire state. So David, question's extremely good one, right, but what we are trying to do is try to be able to say, you know, we are going to just span those two worlds and provide as many tools as possible to ensure that customers feel like, you know, the shift, if you will, or the move between traditional enterprise software application development and the more modern cloud native can be bridged as seamlessly as possible. >> Yeah, Joe, we heard a lot of this at AnsibleFest, so the ACM as a key component of your innovation, and frankly, your competitive posture. Anything you would add to what Ashesh just shared? >> Well, I think that one of the things that Red Hat is really good at is we take management and automation as sort of an intrinsic part of what needs to go on. It's not an afterthought. You just don't go build something, go, "Oh I need management," go out and, you know, go get something, right, so we've been working on, sort of automation and management for many, many years, right, so we build it in concert with these platforms, right, and we understand the physics of these different environments, so we're very focused on that from inception, as opposed to an afterthought when people sort of paint themselves into a corner or have management challenges they can't deal with. >> There's a lot of analogs in our business, isn't there? Management is a bolt-on and security is a bolt-on. It just doesn't work that well and certainly doesn't scale. Stefanie, I want to come back to you and I want to come back to the edge. We hear a lot of people talking about extending their deployments to the edge in the future. I mean, you look at what IBM's doing. They're essentially betting its business on RHEL and OpenShift and betting that its customers are going to do the same as well are you. Maybe talk about, you know, what you're doing to specifically extend RHEL to the edge. >> Yeah, Dave, so we've been looking at this space consistent with our strategy, as Ashesh talked about, right? Our goal is to make sure that it all looks and feels the same and provides one single Linux experience. We've been building on a number of those aspects for quite some time, things like being able to deal with heterogeneous architectures, as an example, being able to deal with, you know, having Arm components and x86 components and power components and being able to leverage all of that from multiple vendors and being able to deploy. Those are things we've been focused on for a long time and now when you move into the space of the edge, certainly we're seeing, you know, essentially data center level hardware move out to be dis-aggregated and dispersed as they move it closer to the data and where that's coming in and where the analysis needs to be done, but some of those foundational things that we've been working on for years starts to pay off because the edge tends to be more heterogeneous all the way from an architecture level to an application level, so now we're seeing some asks. We've been working upstream in order to pull in some features that drive capabilities around specifically updating, deploying those updates, doing rollbacks and things like that, so we're focused on that. But really, it's about pulling together the capabilities of having multiple architectures, dealing with heterogeneous infrastructure out there at the edge, being able to reliably deploy it even when, for example, we have customers who they deploy their hardware and they can't touch it for years. How do they make sure that that's out there in a stable environment that they can count on? And then, you know, adding in things like containerization. We talked about the magic of that, being able to deploy an application consistently and being able to deploy a single container out there to the edge. We're thinking about it all the way from the architecture up to how the application gets deployed and it's going to take the whole portfolio to do that as you need to manage it, as you need to deploy containers, so it's a focus across the company for how we deal with that. >> And as we were talking about before, you know, it takes a village. You know that bromide, but it does, requires an ecosystem of jobs. I mean, there's some real technical challenges in R&D that has to happen. I mean, you've got to be, you know, you're talking about cloud native in all three different clouds, and you know, and not just the big three, but other clouds and then bringing that to the edge, so there's some clear technical challenges, but there's also some business challenges out there. So you know, what are you seeing in that regard? You know, what are some of those things that you hope to solve by bridging that gap? >> Well, I think one of the things we're trying to do and I'm focused on the management and automation side is to provide a common set of management tooling of automation, right, and I think Ansible fits that quite well. So for the past five years since Ansible's been part of Red Hat, we've expanded from, you know, they started off initially doing configuration management, right? We've expanded to include, you know, network and storage and security, now edge. At AnsibleFest, we demonstrated things like serverless event-driven automation, right, building an OpenShift serverless in Knative. We're trying to expand the use cases for Ansible so that there's a simplicity, there's a tool reduction, right, across all these environments and you don't have to go deal with nine vendors, and you know, 17 different tools to try to manage each element here to be able to provide a common set. It reduces complexity, cost and allows skills to be able to be reused across these different areas. It's going to all be about digital acceleration, right, and reducing that complexity. And one last comment. One of the reasons we bought Ansible years ago is the architecture, it's agent-less. Many of our competitors that you hear, the first thing they want to do is go deploy an agent somewhere and that creates its own ongoing burden of, do I have the latest version of the agent? Is it secure? Does it fit on the device? As Stefanie mentioned, is there a version that fits on the architecture the device is running on? It starts getting really, really complicated. So Ansible is just simple, elegant, agent-less. We've expanded the domains we can automate with it and we've expanded sort of the modality. How can I call it? User, driven by an event, as part of some life cycle management, app deployment, Ansible plugs right in. >> Well, Joe, you can tell you're a management guy, right? Agents, another thing that has to be managed. You just laundry list of stuff. (laughs) I want to come back to this notion Joe just touched on, this digital transformation. They say, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Well, COVID broke everything. And I got to say, I mean, all the talk about digital transformation over the last, you know, several years, yes, it was certainly happening, but there was also a lot of lip service going on and now if you're not digital, you're out of business. And so, you know, given everything that we've seen in the last, you know, whatever, 150, 200 days or so, what's the impact that you're seeing on customers' digital transformation initiatives, and you know, what is Red Hat doing to respond? Maybe Ashesh, you could start and we can get feedback from the others. >> Yeah, David, it's an unfortunate thing to say, right, but there's that meme going around with regard to who's responsible for digital transformation and it's a little bit of I guess gallows humor to call it COVID, but we're increasingly seeing that customers and the journey that they're on is one that they haven't really gotten off, even with this, if you will, change of environment that's come about. So projects that we've seen in play, you know, are still underway. We've seen acceleration, actually, in some places with regard to making services more easily accessible. Anyone who's invested in hybrid cloud or public cloud is seeing huge value with regard to being able to consume services remotely, being able to do this on demand and that's a big part of the value proposition, you know, that comes forward. And increasingly what we're trying to do is try to say, how can we engage and assist you in these times, right? So our services team, for example, has transformed to be able to help customers remotely. Our support team has gone off and work more and more with customers. For a company like Red Hat, that hasn't been completely, if you will, difficult thing to do mostly because we've been so used to working in a distributed fashion, working remotely with our customers, so that's not a challenge in itself, but making sure customers understand that this is really a critical journey for them to go on and how we can kind of help them, you know, walk through that has been good and we're finding that that message really resonates. Right, so both Stefanie and Joe talked a little bit about, you know, how essentially our entire portfolio is now built around, you know, ensuring that if you'd like to consume on demand, we can help support you, if you'd like to consume in a traditional fashion, we can help you. That amount of flexibility that we provide to customers is really coming to bear at this point in time. >> So maybe we could wrap with, we haven't really dropped any customer names. Stefanie and Joe and Ashesh, I wonder if you have any stories you can share or, you know, customer examples that we could close on that are exciting to you this year. >> So I can start, if that's okay. >> Please. >> So an area that I find super interesting from a customer perspective that we're increasingly seeing more and more customers go down is sheer interest in, if you will, kind of diversity of use cases that we're seeing, right? So we see this, for example, in automotive, right? So whether it's a BMW or a Volkswagen, we see this now in health care with the ACA, in we'll say a little bit more traditional industries like energy with Exxon or Schlumberger around increasingly embrace of AIML, right? So artificial machine learning, if you will, advanced analytics being much more proactive with regard to how they can take data that's coming in, adjust it, be able to make sense of the patterns and then be able to, you know, have some action that has real business impact. So this whole trend towards, you know, AIML workloads that they can run is extremely powerful. We work very closely with Nvidia, as well, and we're seeing a lot of interest, for example, in being able to run a Kubernetes-based platform, support Nvidia GPUs for specific class workloads. There's a whole bunch of customers, people in financial services that, you know, this is a rich area of interest. You know, we've seen great use cases for example around grid with Deutsche Bank. And so, to me, I'm personally really excited to see kind of that embrace the PC from our customers regard to saying there's a whole lot of data that's out there. You know, how can we essentially use all of these tools that we have in place? You know, we talk about containers, microservices, DevOps, you know, all of this and then put it to bear to really put to work and get business value. >> Great, thank you for that, Ashesh. Stefanie, Joe, Stefanie, anything you want to add or final thoughts? >> Yeah, just one thing to add and I think Ashesh talked to a whole number across industry verticals and customers. But I think the one thing that I've seen through COVID is that if nothing else, it's taught us that change is the only constant and I think, you know, our whole vision of open hybrid cloud is how to enable customers to be flexible and do what they need to do when they need to do it, wherever they want to deploy, however they want to build. We provide them some consistency, right, across that as they make those changes and I think as I've worked with customers here through since the beginning of COVID, it's been amazing to me the diversity of how they've had to respond. Some have doubled down in the data center, some have doubled down on going public cloud and to me, this is the proof of the strategy that we're on, right, that open hybrid cloud is about delivering flexibility, and boy, nothing's taught us the need for flexibility like COVID has recently, so I think there's a lot more to do. I think pulling together the platforms and the automation is what is going to enable the ability to do that in a simple fashion. >> So Joe, you get the final word. I mean, AnsibleFest 2020, I mean, it's weird, right? But that's the way these events are, all virtual. Hopefully, next year we got a shot at being face to face, but bring us home, please. >> Yeah, I got to tell ya, having, you know, 20,000 or so of your closest friends get together to talk about automation for a couple of days is just amazing. That just shows you sort of the power of it. You know, we have a lot of customers this week at AnsibleFest telling you their story, you know, CarMax and ExxonMobil, you know, BlueCross BlueShield. I mean, there's a number across all different verticals, globally, Cepsa from Europe. I mean, just an incredibly, you know, diverse array of customers and use cases. I would encourage people to look at some of the customer presentations that were on at AnsibleFest, listen to the customer telling you what they're doing with Ansible, deploying their networks, deploying their apps, managing their infrastructure, container apps, traditional apps, connecting it, moving faster. They have amazing stories. I encourage people to go look. >> Well, guys, thanks so much for helping us wrap up AnsibleFest 2020. It was really a great discussion. You guys have always been awesome CUBE guests. Really appreciate the partnership and so thank you. >> Thanks a lot, Dave. Appreciate it. >> Yeah, thanks, Dave. >> Thanks for having us. >> All right, and thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time. (calm music)

>> From around the globe it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AnsibleFest 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is a preview for Red Hat's AnsibleFest 2020, second year that theCUBE's been at the event. Happy to welcome back to the program one of our CUBE alumni, Joe Fitzgerald, he's the vice president and general manager of the division that includes Ansible. Joe, thank you and welcome back to the program. >> Thanks for having me back, Stu, excited to be here. >> So Joe, you know, boy, I think since last year, you know, the overarching trend of automation adoption has only increased, of course, with conversation you and I have had back at Red Hat Summit, as well as all the conversations we're having across the industry. It's been five years now since Red Hat bought Ansible. Remember, you know, big activities at Summit and throughout the industry. A lot has changed. The players that we talked about five years ago definitely have shifted. So why don't you bring us in is to, you know, 2020 you know, the state of your Ansible business and let's give the audience a preview of what we're going to see at the show. >> Sure. So it's been an exciting five years. I can't believe how fast it flew. You know, five years ago when Red Hat acquired this little company called Ansible, they were basically, you know, selling to IT admins in a particular space around config management. They, you know, frequently got lumped in with a, you know, a couple of other companies that were in that segment. Over the past five years the stats are just amazing. Over the past four years it's been in the top 10 open source projects in the world, right? I think Kubernetes is number seven, Ansell's number nine and has been in the top 10 for past five years. The number of contributors, the number of folks with Ansible in their skills, the titles, I mean, the numbers are just amazing. And of course we've had, you know, analyst validation and thousands of customers vote with their subscriptions to Ansible. So it's an amazing five years growth. >> Yeah. Okay. Congratulations. Of course the concern always is, you know, oh, when an acquisition happens, what will happen to the culture, what will happen to the community? Red Hat, everyone knows open sources is in its DNA there. And therefore the community has flourished. I definitely see Ansible at many of the cloud and cloud native type discussions. You talked to, you mentioned Kubernetes, Joe, help draw the dots, connect the dots for us as to, you know, what should we be expecting to see when it comes to things like, you know, Kubernetes, cloud computing, edge computing and the like. >> So it's pretty interesting because, you know, OpenShift has been our flagship offering around Kubernetes at Red Hat, right? And market leader just incredible validation, right? And so, you know, automation connected up to that environment becomes really, really important because even though people are modernizing their apps and running container based apps, there's a lot of other things that those things need to be connected up to. Traditional applications, other systems of record, your CMDBs or change management, things like that. So there's a lot of automation that has to happen around, you know, building, deploying, managing container based apps in those environments. So sort of a teaser for what's coming up here is you're going to see us pushing Ansible even further into areas like Kubernetes and OpenShift at AnsibleFest. >> Yeah, Joe, when I look at the entire landscape, one of the big challenges out there is there's so many tools out there, you know, developers have all the little pieces that they're dealing with. If you talk about Kubernetes, it's "Okay, which cluster am I doing? How do we wrap our arms around managing environments?" I've talked to you about the ACM solution came out of IBM, now part of Red Hat. What I really love that the top learning I had from AnsibleFest last year is various people in the organization can get their view into really that pipeline of development from the product people through the developer. You know, we always hope that software can be a unifying, you know, tool inside an organization. And it definitely felt like Ansible's doing that. So, do we expect that when we talk about Kubernetes, that's the kind of expansion we have is that, you know, not just that I can do more as an individual person, but inside the organization, we can break through some of those silos. >> Yeah. So I think this plays to Ansible's strength. So Ansible, as I mentioned, five years ago was sort of IT admins focused on config. Over the years, we've expanded the number of domains dramatically into network storage, cloud security. We've also expanded the people who use Ansible automation. So Ansible is extremely popular with developers. It's a favorite in tool chains, right, around automation and config and things like that. So bringing together sort of the automation that crosses all those domains and the different personas that use Ansible, right, now bringing that and connecting that up to the Kubernetes environment, right, is extremely powerful in so many ways and covers a lot of the areas where the automation in those Kubernetes environments sort of ends and you have to have that connection to the other teams and to the other technologies that are outside of that to make the thing work. >> All right. So what specifically, should we be expecting to see, you know, what'll be the same, what'll be the different of the virtual environment versus what everybody's come to expect for the in person AnsibleFest? >> Well, first of all, the numbers are amazing, right? We've run a number of events over the course of the year. You know, training webinars, you know, all sorts of Ansible events. Every one of them has exceeded our expectations by a lot. AnsibleFest is no different. We're currently over 15,000 people registered for AnsibleFest. It would not surprise me to see it go much higher than that. Our last in-person Ansible event was 12,000 people. The level of interest globally, right, across personas for AnsibleFest is just amazing. So we think we're going to see a tremendous amount of interest and in typical Red Hat fashion at Fest, we're going to bring out additional Ansible capabilities around Kubernetes environment, obviously, but talking about where Ansible's going with Edge, right, and a number of areas that people are pushing out on Ansible automation. I believe Ansible's becoming sort of the de facto standard in automation, regardless of what domain, regardless of what persona. And I think AnsibleFest is going to show again why it is. >> Awesome. Well, Joe bold statement. Absolutely phenomenal to see the momentum there. I'll let you have the final word as to if they haven't already, why should people sign up and any other kind of, you know, cool customers or things that people should dive into once they have a chance to look at the agenda? >> Well, if somebody is familiar with Ansible, then they're going to love the expansion of the domains and the capabilities necessary to really expand usage of Ansible. If you're new to Ansible, Ansible, you know, if you look at the number of LinkedIn jobs that talk about Ansible, it's, you know, it's in the tens of thousands, right? Indeed top 10 skill that people are looking for in hiring. So automation is more important than ever given the sort of the world backdrop. So I would encourage people to really look at Ansible, right, to expand the professional, you know, skills and things like that. And people that are already in the know that are using Ansible, wait till you see how you can use it for Kubernetes Edge and really expand it beyond where you are today with it. >> All right. Well, Joe Fitzgerald, thank you so much. And to our audience, you know, go check out the website, really easy to find, register online. theCUBE will have a full lineup. John Furrier is going to be the lead host for the event in our second year of coverage. Joe, have a great event and as always, thanks for having theCUBE. >> Thanks, Stu. Appreciate it. >> All right, check out theCUBE.net for all the upcoming events, as well as you can look at the back catalog. Of course, we've done seven years of Red Hat Summit as well as the AnsibleFest last year. So lots of good customer studies, as well as deep dives on all the product. Thank you for joining. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks as always for watching. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. >>It's the Cube with >>coverage of Coop Khan and Cloud Native Con Europe 2020 Virtual brought to you by Red Hat Cloud, >>Native Computing Foundation and >>Ecosystem Partners. Hi. And welcome back. I'm stew Minuteman. And this is the cube coverage of que con cognitive con 2020. The Europe virtual addition Course kubernetes won the container wars as we went from managing a few containers that managing clusters, too many customers managing multiple clusters and that and get more complicated. So to help understand those challenges and how solutions are being put out to solve them, having a welcome back to the from one of our cube alumni do if it Gerald is the vice president and general manager of the management business unit at Red Hat. Joe, good to see you again. Thanks so much for joining us >>two. Thanks for having me back. >>All right, so at Red Hat Summit, one of the interesting conversation do you and I add, was talking about advanced cluster management or a CME course. That was some people and some technology that came over to Red hat from IBM post acquisition. So it was tech preview give us the update. What's the news? And, you know, just level set for the audience. You know what cluster management is? >>Sure, So advanced Cluster manager or a CMS, We actually falling, basically, is a way to manage multiple clusters. Ross, even different environments, right? As people have adopted communities and you know, we have at several 1000 customers running open shift on their starting to push it in some very, very big ways. And so what they run into is a stay scale. They need better ways to manage. It would make those environments, and a CMS is a huge way to help manage those environments. It was early availability back at Summit end of April, and in just a few months now it's generally available. We're super excited about that. >>Well, that that Congratulations on moving that from technical preview to general availability so fast. What can you tell us? How many customers have you had used this? What have you learned in talking to them about this solution? >>So, first of all, we're really pleasantly surprised by the amount of people that were interested in the tech preview. Integrity is not a product that's ready to use in production yet so a lot of times accounts are not interested in. They want to wait for the production version. We had over 100 customers in our tech review across. Not only geography is all over the world Asia, America, Europe, us across all different verticals. There's a tremendous amount of interest in it. I think that just shows you know, how applicable it is to these environments of people trying to manage. So tremendous had update. We got great feedback from that. And in just a few months, we incorporate that feedback into the now generally available product. So great uptick during the tech created >>Excellent Bring assigned side a little bit, you know, When would I use this solution? If I just have a single cluster, Does it make sense for May eyes? Is it only for multi clusters? You know, what's the applicability of the offering? Yes, sir, even for >>single clusters that the things that ACM really does fall into three major areas right allows closer lifecycle management. Of course, that would mean that you have more than one cluster ondas people grow. They do for a number of reasons. Also, policy based management the ability to enforced and fig policies and enforce compliance across even your single cluster to make sure that stays perfect in terms of settings and configuration and things like that. Any other application. Lifecycle management The ability to deploy applications in more advanced way, even if you're on a single cluster, gets even better for multi cluster. But you can deploy your APS to just the clusters that are tagged a certainly, but lots of capabilities, even for application, even a single cluster. So we find even people that are running a single cluster need it askew, deployed more more clusters. You're definitely >>that's great. Any you mentioned you had feedback from customers. What are the things that I guess would be the biggest pain points that this solves for them that they were struggling with in the past? Well, >>first of being able to sort of Federated Management multiple clusters, right, as opposed to having to manage each cluster individually, but the ability to do policy based configuration management to just express the way you want things to stay, have them stay that way to adopt a more of a getups ethnology in terms of how they're managing their your open ships environments. There's lots more feedback, but those were some of the ones that seem to be fairly common, repetitive across the country. >>Yeah, and you know, Joe, you've also gotten automation in the management suite. How do I think about this? How does this fit into the broader management automation that customers were using? Well, >>I think as people in employees environments. And it was a long conversation about platform right? But there's a lot of things that have to go with the platform and red hats actually in very good about that, in terms of providing all the things you necessary that you would find necessary to make the five form successful in your environment. Right? So I was seen by four. We need storage, then development environments management, the automation ability to train on it. We have our open innovation labs. There's lots of things that are beyond the platform that people acquire in order to be successful. In the case of management automation, ACM was a huge advancement. Terms had managed these environments, but we're not done. We're gonna continue to ADM or automation integration with things like answerable mawr, integration with observe ability and analytics so far from done. But we want to make sure that open ship stays the best managed environment that's out there. I also do want to make a call out to the fact that you know, this team has been working on this technology for the past couple of years. And so, you know, it's only been a red hat for five months. This technology is actually very mature, but it is quite an accomplishment for any company to take a new team in a new technology. And in five months, do what Red Hat does to it in terms of making it consumable for the enterprise. So then kudos continue. Really not >>well. And I know a piece of that is, you know, moving that along to be open source. So, you know, where are we with the solution? Now that is be a How does that fit in tow being open? Source. >>Eso supports that are open source Already. When the process of open sourcing the rest of it, as you've seen over time read, it has a perfect record here of acquiring technologies that were either completely closed Source Open core in some cases where part it was open. It was closed. But that was the case with Ansell a few years ago. But basically our strategy is everything has to be open source. That takes time in the process of going through all of the processes necessary to open source parts of ACM on. We think that will find lots of interest in the community around the different projects inside of >>Yeah. How about what? One of the bigger concerns talking to customers in general about kubernetes even Mawr in 2020 is. What about security? How does a CME help customers make sure that their environment to secure? >>Yeah, so you know, configuration policies and forcing you can actually sent with ACM that you want things to be a certain way that somebody changes them that automatically either warn you about them or enforcement would set them back. So it's got some very strong security chops in terms of keeping the configurations just the way you want. That gets harder as you get more and more clusters. Imagine trying to keep everything but the same levels, settings, software, all the parts and pieces so affected you have ACM that can do this across any and all of your clusters really took the burden off people trying to maintain secure environments, >>okay, and so generally available. Now, anything you can share about how this solution is priced, how it fits in tow. The broader open shift offerings, >>Yes. Oh, so it's an add on for open shift is priced very similarly to open shift in terms of the, you know, core pricing. One thing I do want to mention about ACM, which maybe doesn't come out just by a description product is the fact that a scene was built from scratch for communities, environments and optimize for open shift. We're seeing a lot of competition out there that's taking products that were built for other environments, trying to sort of been member coerce them into managing kubernetes environments. We don't think people are going to be successful at that. Haven't been successful to date. So one things that we find as sort of a competitive differentiator for ACM and market is the fact that it was built from scratch designed for communities environments. So it is really well designed for the environment it's trying to manage, and we think that's gonna keep your competitive edge? >>Well, always. Joe. When you have a new architecture, you advantage of things. Any examples that you have is what, what a new architecture like this can do that that an older architecture might struggle with or not believe. Be able to do even though when you look at the product sheet, the words sound similar. But when you get underneath the covers, it's just not a good architect well fit. >>Yeah, so it's very similar sort of the shift from physical to virtual. You can't have a paradigm shift in the infrastructure and not have a sort of a corresponding paradigm shift in management tool. So the way you monitor these environments, where you secure them the way they scale and expand, we do resource management, security. All those things are vastly different in this environment compared to, let's say, a virtual more physical environment. So this has improved many times in the past. You know, paradigm shift in the infrastructure or the application environment will drive a commensurate paradigm shift in management. That's what you're seeing here. So that's why we thought it was super important to have management that was built for these environments. by design. So it's not trying to do sort of unnatural things north manage the environment. >>Yeah, I wondered. I love to hear just a little bit your philosophy as to what's needed in this space. You know, I look back to previous generations, look at virtualization. You know, Microsoft did very well at managing their environment, the M where did the same for their environments. But, you know, we've had generations of times where solutions have tried to be management of everything, and that could be challenging. So, you know, what's Red Hat in a CM's position and what do we need in the community space, you know, today and for the next couple of years. >>So kubernetes itself is the automation platform you talked about, you know, early on in the second. So you know, Cooper navies itself provides, you know, a lot of automation around container management. What a CME does is build a top it out and then capture, you know, data and events and configuration items in the environment and then allows you to define policies. People want to move away from manual processes. Certainly, but they wanna be able to get to a more state full expression of the way things should be. You want to be able to use more about, you know, sort of get up, you know, kind of philosophy where they say, this is how I want things today. Check the version in, keep it at that level. If it changes, put it back. Tell me about it. But sort of the era of chasing. You know, management with people is changing. You're seeing a huge premium now on probation. So automation at all levels. And I think this is where a cm's automation on top of open shift automation on down the road, combined with things like ansell, will provide the most automated environment you can have for these container platforms. Um, so it's definitely changing your seeing observe ability, ai ops getups type of philosophies Coming in these air very different manager in the past helps you seeing innovation across the whole management landscape in the communities environment because they are so different. The physics of them are different than the previous environments. We think with ACM answerable or insights product and some over analytics that we've got the right thing for this environment >>and can give us a little bit of a look forward, you know? How often should we expect to see updates on this? Of course. You mentioned getting feedback from the community from the technical preview to G A. So give us a little bit. Look, you know, what should we be expecting to see from a CME down the right the So >>the ACM team is far from done, right? So they're going to continue to rev, you know, just like we read open shift, that very, very fast base we're gonna be reading ACM and fast face. Also, you see a lot of integration between ACM. A lot of the partners were already working with in the application monitoring space and the analytics space security automation I would expect to see in the uncivil fest time frame, which is mid October, will cease, um, integration with danceable on ACM around things. That insult does very well combined with what ACM does. A sand will continue to push out on Mawr cluster management, more policy based management and certainly advancing the application life cycles that people are very interested in ruined faster. They want to move faster with a higher degree of certainty in their application. Employments on ACM is right there. >>It just final question for you, Joe, is, you know, just in the broader space, looking at management in this kind of cube con cloud, native con ecosystem final words, you want customers to understand where we are today and where we need to go down the road. >>So I think the you know, the market and industry has decided communities is the platform of future right? And certainly we were one of the earliest to invest in container management platforms with open shift were one of the first to invest in communities. We have thousands of customers running open shift back Russell Industries on geography is so we bet on that a long time ago. Now we're betting on the management automation of those environments and bringing them to scale. And the other thing I think that redhead is unique on is that we think that people gonna want to run their kubernetes environments across all different kinds of environments, whether it's on premise visible in virtual multiple public clouds, where we have offerings as well as at the edge. Right. So this is gonna be an environment that's going to be very, very ubiquitous. Pervasive, deported scale. And so the management of a nation has become a necessity. And so but had investing in the right areas to make sure that enterprises continues communities particularly open shift in all the environments that they want at the scale. >>All right. Excellent. Well, Joe, I know we'll be catching up with you and your team for answerable fest. Ah, coming in the fall. Thanks so much for the update. Congratulations to you in the team on the rapid progression of ACM now being G A. >>Thanks to appreciate it, we'll see you soon. >>All right, Stay tuned for more coverage from que con club native con 2020 in Europe, the virtual addition on still minimum and thanks, as always, for watching the Cube.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Red Hat. Summit 2020 Brought to you by Red Hat. >>Hi, I'm stupid, man. And this is the Cube's coverage of Red Hat Summit. Of course, it's happening digitally. We're interviewing Red Hat executives, customers and partners from around the globe who can are gonna be part of this event. And happy to welcome back to the program. One of our Cube alumni, Joe Fitzgerald, who is the vice president and general manager of the management business unit at Red Hat. Last time I caught up with Joe is that answerable fest last year. And, uh, Joseph, fourth year in a row, You've been on the Cube here at Red Hat Summit. Thanks so much for joining us again. >>Thanks for having me back. Still, I'm happy to be here, >>All right, So, Joe, I think it actually makes sense for us to kind of pick up the conversation where we left off and answer both best last year, so answerable fast. It's all about automation. You're really helping with digital transformation. What companies are going through in today's day and age automation and being able to be more agile. Of course, everybody, for the most part, is working from home, being able to enable things remote. The adoption of cloud is even more consideration. So what part there? And since we last talked, you know, obviously things have changed for everyone some, but give us the latest from your organization. >>Thanks to you know, when we met and so fast in Atlanta last fall, we were talking about strategic use of our nation. Um, in today's current crisis, if you will. There's a lot of folks who are leaning on automation in a much more immediate and tactical way. We're seeing a lot of automation being used by folks to the boy, either the infrastructure they need to deal with capacity and surge demand that they have. Right now, we're seeing people use it for things like working from home because they can't get access to gear we're seeing for bursting to public clouds because they can add more physical equipment, perhaps in the data center. So last year we were excited to talk to you about strategic automation. That's still really important. But right now a lot of folks have more pressing matters in terms of automating to get through the current crisis coming to you from northern New Jersey, which is certainly a hot spot on, but certainly a lot appreciation for the folks on the front lines. They're taking care of us and protecting us and things like that. We want to do everything we can as a company, as red hat, to enable folks to do whatever they need to do to be able to get through this crisis. >>Yeah, absolutely. Joe Ah, very important topics there. In the keynote for Red Hat Summit, there's discussion of your group, and of course, management has always been a critical piece of how we look at overall i t. When I first became an analyst, the joke was, Well, you know, security and management. We can always kind of okay, those pillars is two things we need to do is an industry to make things better. Ah, specifically, we've been talking for years about the growth of container ization and kubernetes. Of course, Red hat, strong leadership position with open shift. My understanding that if I heard right from the keynote, it's the advanced cluster. Management is the new piece. Can you give us a little bit about, you know, the team, the technology, how this fits into the overall red hat portfolio. >>Sure, so we're super excited around advanced cluster management. It turns out that you know, we have a lot of customers that are running open shift to other container based applications, and as they evolve, they inevitably end up with multiple clusters based on separation of duties or lines of business, perhaps for distributed availability zones and things like that with their clusters, so they inevitably back into a multi cluster scenario. What we've done is working with IBM would develop some very rich technology around advanced management for multi cluster environments built from scratch for container environments and kubernetes. We worked with IBM. We move that technology over to Red Hat. But when the process of doing two things one is we're announcing tech preview here at Summit of that technology and where the process we're open sourcing that technology because we're red hat and everything we do is open source. We're going to take some of the most advanced container management cluster management technology in the world that we've gotten from IBM, and we're going to open source that we're excited here is that we're gonna provide this red hat, offering advanced cluster management to help people who are struggling with managing clusters. >>Yeah, Joe, absolutely a super important point point. Anybody that's watched this space for the last few years, simplicity has not been the word that people have used for it. And over the last year there's been a lot of announcements from some of the major players in the industry about how do I manage those multiple cluster environment? So, Joe, if I think back two years ago Ah, it was, you know, here's the best way to run kubernetes. And when you talk to a lot of customers, it was well, they were starting with often spinning their own because that was what was available. And the number one choice that I usually heard from customers was, Oh, if I'm a Red Hat customer, started using open shift and start using open ships everywhere, fast forward to where we are today. Of course, you have lots of customers running open shift, but also in the public clouds. If I'm using Amazon, Google, Microsoft, other platform environments, often there's a native kubernetes, and I need to manage across those environments. So do I understand right? ACM Is that going toe? Help me not only with my open shift but as it moves forward. Also, manage some of those other kubernetes environment. And how does Red Hat approach this kind of the same or differently? From what I hear from from Microsoft with Arc with VM Ware with Andrew >>So ACM vessels Management from Red Hat supports any standard kubernetes environment. One of the advantages we have working in an open shift environments Open shift has a lot of functionality sides Kuban aids. In other words, it's already a layer of sophistication built on top of kubernetes, so open shift itself provides a lot of management automation. Now you had advanced cluster management on top of that, which will be able to import other communities clusters from other environments. But the ability for its take advantage of the sophistication that's already in open shift and then leverage things like Hansel Automation and then some of the management. SAS Services cloud at red dot com We're connected customer experience the ability to proactively look at open shift clusters and be ableto some cases tell people about problems they're having before they even realize they have the problem. That combination of management automation on top of the already rich open shift environment really puts us. A couple of you know, runs up in terms of capabilities. I'll be on a standard kubernetes vanilla. Our >>yeah, so one of the reasons I was looking forward to this conversation is one of the things that we've been looking at for the last few years is how is multi cloud the same or different from what we have done back, You know, 10 15 years ago with multi vendor. And I think anybody that's been around long enough and you talk about management in a multi vendor environment and you think about the leading tools from a software standpoint. We're out there and it gives us a little bit of flashbacks, and it's not. Not in a good way. So what have we learned as an industry? And, you know, you talked about it, you know, integration with answerable all the automation, you know, how do we make sure that we aren't repeating the sins of the past with these new generation of management tools? >>Well, what we've seen is that enterprises are inherently going to be hybrid and multi cloud red has been talking about open hybrid cloud for almost eight years. Right? So our CTO Paul Cormier, you know, sort of anticipated this, which was pretty insightful eight years ago because everybody thought and people gonna move exclusively cloud it would have any data centers and maybe hardware anywhere. That's why you've got data centers edge multiple public clouds with services that are all over those different footprints. We believe that, you know, unlike the past when you had heterogeneous systems management, right where you have different platforms that we're trying to manage is the lowest common denominator is a common platform. Now what Red hat is offering is open shift, which will run on all the public clouds, as well as on your physical and virtual hardware in the data centers at the edge. So it basically provides the consistency, which means that the management can then talk to a consistent environment, provided much higher level hybrid cloud management and trying to either have silos of different management tools by cloud by vendor by environment, um, and then try to Federated at the lowest common denominator. You'll see kubernetes management tools, for example, that have to use the lowest, you know, sort of common denominator, which is the straight kubernetes AP eyes. We could take advantage of those, but also the additional functionality That open shift brings in, for example, with the other kids abilities. It allows us to have a higher level of management but provide that consistency by having the same hybrid cloud platform this case. Coburn's shift run across those different environments. >>Yeah, so what? One of the things that also consumer concerns me a little bit as the industry when they talk about kubernetes. It's very much a discussion of the infrastructure piece, but we know this move to cloud native is very much about the application and the application development. So help me understand a little bit how that overall story for kind of the app Dev see I CD all those pieces fit into your story. I was one of the major points of discussion. You know, the best. >>Yeah, so So it is really all about the application. People really don't want to think about the infrastructure. They don't think about the application. That's really what's driving their business and their differentiation in the case of open shift, but open shift provides application. Lifecycle management for kubernetes environments are advanced. Cluster management sort of takes that a step further and allows you to extend that life cycle so that you can deploy applications based on policy to different environments based on your needs. Keeps compliance. All those things enforce regardless of how many different places the traction application. So it's not just a Z Z as taking an application to going into one location. People want to be able to continuously update their applications and deploy it to all of the places that it needs to be there based on availability, a proximity security environments and things like that represents a hard challenge. And so that's why some of the tools, like Advanced cluster Management, are exactly designed to help those kind of new applications. Yeah, >>all right, Joe, you talked about that. Some of the technology for for ACM came from the IBM side. Give us the update. When you look at the IBM Cloud portfolio, how is your group really interacting and supporting and working with the overall IBM solutions? >>So IBM has a very robust portfolio and they have you know a number of the cloud packs in their portfolio that address things like applications and data management, things like that. So IBM, in this case, I developed some advanced cluster management technology, but it was not open source. It wasn't available to other folks. One of the challenges with that is that we believe, as red Hat that the innovations happening in open source. If you develop something in a closed, proprietary way, maybe the best thing in the world today, a year, two years, three years from now there are other projects and there are other technologies have being collaborated on open that are going to make. But we leave you behind, right? So we think open is the future. So in this case, and working with IBM, we took some very advanced technology. We moved it over to Red Hat, and now we're in the process of open sourcing it, as well as providing an enterprise consumable version. More technology in Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for kubernetes, IBM again has to support a much broader, diverse environment, right in terms of everything from mainframes to edge and containers and V M's and physical machines applications that span decades, So they have a much bigger sort of, you know, target environment that they have to work in. Red Hat's focused on the future. We're really sort of skating to where the puck is, if you will use a you know, hockey analogy where basically, we're trying to anticipate what enterprises are going to need and address that with not only the platforms with management automation, you're going to need to be successful with the cloud. >>Yeah, Joe, I want I want you to bring it into your customers and you talk about all these changes that are happening in the landscape and how they manage it. Any insight you can give as to, you know, organizational structures. You know, I remember last year at Summit I talked to a number of companies going through digital transformation. And, you know, we know that there is as much if not more organizational change that needs happen along with the technology pieces. So from your world, you know who's kind of leading the charge, what skill sets do people need to either, you know, bring to it or learn new on And you know, our companies, you know, taking advantage of >>Well, as they say, developers are sort of the new kingmakers, right? In some ways. And so you know the tools that you've always said people process and technology, right? And I know as software companies get very, very excited about technology, but it turns out that the people, the process here way people building their applications, Way Dev ops and see I CD. It's a very, very sort of different environment for management automation tools, you know and sort of. The relationship between teams has changed and will change more, by the way. And so one of things we're trying to do. You see this with answerable, but you're also seeing this with Advanced Cluster Management is ability to delegate and give different kinds of operational and management capabilities to the teams, whether it's like business developers, QE teams. So it's fundamentally changing the way that the processes were working. That requires that the tools map to those new team structures. There's no new processes on, and that's what I think's going on it fundamentally different, and one of things I think you're going to see is management tools that were built in the past for these were the old style organizing are not going to fare well in the new World, where these processes and the team structures are changing. >>All right, So, Joe, before I want to get some feedback from you on how your technologies and teams they're helping with the code 19 piece. But let's just wrap up the ACM discussion before we do that. So you said it's a tech preview. S 01 of things that really nice is when you move things to open source, the community gets pretty good visibility as to when things were getting releases. New features down the pike. So what should we be looking for as an industry for ACM? When that rolls out, how two people start getting their hands on it and you know, what does that look like? >>So there's really two paths there. One is from a tech preview point of view. You know, customers can get access to the technology right and see it in their environment and give us feedback. The fact that it's been developed for the past two years probably constitutes hundreds of years of developer, um, you know, time in it. It's not Alfa technology. It's pretty robust. So even though we're calling a tech preview, we anticipate that it's going to be production ready in short fashion. It will take us a little bit of time to open. Source. The technology's red hat has a history of open sourcing technologies that we acquire. Each one varies in terms of what's in the code licenses, how it's structured, how it should be open source. We just don't back the truck up and take a bunch of code and put in a repository is actually a thoughtful process about the way that's projects or set up a communities they should be in. We're going through that process now, but customers will be able to take advantage of it in short fashion, and I think they're gonna find a very high level of maturity, given how long and how much. I mean it's work of this, >>you know, a really important piece is there. The other one closed the discussion with how we started off. Obviously, you know, workers and companies are having to make changes and be more flexible than ever in response to the Kobe 19 endemic. What are some of the pieces of technologies and services Ah, that that you want to highlight as toe that are helping companies really adjust to what is happening in today's world. >>Well, Red Hat is always been a very conscientious company. And in my particular area, one of things we're doing is with sensible. We're trying to enable folks to use automation providing free workshop, free workshops and access to code playbooks and things for different environments. If you think about the different kinds of industries right now, some are struggling with no smaller workforces work at home. Other ones are under tremendous pressure to deliver services to help keep us safe and protect us. So we're trying to provide as much a so we can in terms of automation, enabling people to use free, open source innovation on automation to enable work from home to do everything from creative TVNZ toe, you know, set their statuses and communicate between teams in this new environment, but to burst into a lot of clouds in some cases because somewhere trying to scale because their business is now change but is under tremendous pressure. You see that delivery services and things like that. So we're trying to to help as much as we can with automation is something that could be immediately helpful and has been some of these other projects. You know, somebody's doing a transformation, and they're designing new applications as much longer. Burn to it. Whereas automation is needed today by companies under duress, you can help them accelerate, um, and connect the their their new work at home environments. Sweetie Automation. Helping a lot. The other thing I want to mention is that we have free capabilities like red hat insights that can actually access systems for security. The last thing you need is a security breach or some other problem. Why you're dealing with fighting fires. There are bad actors out there. We've seen a few already eso insides ability to look at systems and tell people what their current posture is. So they immediately, quickly, whether with our tools or some other tool they have. We're trying to do as much as we can to help our customers for this really tough time. >>Well, Joe, thank you so much for the updates. Ah, congratulations to the team on the progress and absolutely very important topics to help customers that need to react even faster than ever in today's time. Extra funding. I'm stew. Minimum lots more coverage from Red Hat Summit on the Cube. Check out the cube dot net. And thank you for watching. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>Live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the cube covering Ansible Fest 2019. Brought to you by red hat. >>Welcome back. Everyone's cubes live covers here in Atlanta for Ansible Fest. Here's the cube covers. Have red hats event around automation for all. John Ford's do many men. Our next guest is Joe Fitzgerald, Cuba Lum, vice president, general manager of the management business unit at red hat. Great timing for Ansible. Great to have you back on the cube. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. And it's great to have you here at Ansible Fest. Super essential for camera timing about Ansible. Let's do an, I did our intro, uh, analysis and platformization of automation. Big, big move, big news. But there's a bigger trend at play here around automation. Why is the timing now for automation discussions with Ansible? So good. The demand for automation is so broad in enterprises, right? They're trying to do everything from, you know, dev ops, tool chains to IOT devices. >>I'm trying to deploy things faster, uh, you know, fix security vulnerabilities faster. It's all about speed, agility, efficiency. It all comes back to automation. And the news here is the general availability, although available in November as announced on keynote of the Ansible automation platform. So this is something that's been going on for a while and I suppose just been grown weighing now it's a platform. What's in the platform? Why is it important? Why should customers care? So, uh, you know, we've been on this journey with Ansible which started off as this incredibly simple, elegant architecture and a way to automate things. And what's happened over the past couple of years is it's exploded in terms of the number of people who are using it, the number of people who are generating automation integration. Um, and so in working with a lot of customers, right, what we saw the need for was really to help them collaborate and scale their automation efforts. >>Um, scale, you know, who could, you know, build, reuse, share, uh, score content and track it. Really important. So we put a lot of those efforts into the platform to take it to the next level. Really. You know, we've been talking about Ansible, gum stew, going back when you know, 2014 OpenStack, I think I remember we are first talking about the cube. It had a cult following when it emerged. You guys acquired it at what, the next year, 2015 roughly. Um, but Annabelle had this cult following of people who just loved to get into the configuration side of things, make them go better. You guys acquired it, done well with it, kept it going, get the community flywheel, keep rolling a lot of progress since then. So what are you most proud of? What's the most notable things? Oh, the growth of the Ansible journey. What's, what's the big story there? >>So, uh, it's almost four years since red hat acquired Ansible. And I remember when I proposed acquiring Ansible and swell was this small, you know, Eastern U S company with sort of a community cult following, but very small in terms of, you know, commercials and, and reach and stuff like that. Mostly focused on the configuration space. Like a lot of the other automation tools over the past four years. Probably the best thing we did that redhead is really good at is we let the community do what the community does best, right? The innovation, the number of contributors, the amount of Ansible integration modules, playbooks has exploded, right. Uh, if you were in the keynote this morning, um, it was number six on the, you know, repository list out of 100 million, you know, almost, you know, just a massive amount of projects and here it is at number six. >>So we didn't perturb the community, we actually helped it grow and we've been able to help the technology evolve from a config automation product and technology into this very broad spectrum. Now enterprise automation platform that crosses domains like, you know, networks and security and storage and cloud and windows. Just a phenomenal, uh, you know, growth in it. Yup. Show help. Explain how platform sets up Ansible for it future. They talked in the keynote a little bit about starting with some of the, uh, kinda core partners in the collections that they're offering. But in the future for a platform to really be a platform, it needs to be something that users themselves can build on top of. So, you know, help us understand where it is today. You know, when it first announced here for November, um, and where it shows shall be going in the future. >>So we didn't use the platform word lightly. Um, I think that, you know, platform has a set of connotations and, and it's sort of a set of requirements. What we saw was that different teams and groups inside organizations, we're bringing Ansible in and using the technology and having very good success in their particular area. Then what we saw was these teams were trying to share automation and collaborate across organizations. Then even in the community, there's tens of thousands of rolls and playbooks out there that the community has built. There might be 300 that do the same thing, which is the best one, which, which one are people using? Uh, you know, how successful is it? How long does it take? Um, what we found was that they needed a bunch of tools to be able to collaborate, track, uh, analytics about stuff so that they could share and collaborate at a higher scale. >>Yeah. I, that's one of the great value propositions when we talk about SAS is if it's done well, not only can I share internally, but I can learn from others that have used the platform and make it easier to take advantage of that. So is that part of that vision that you see with the platform? Yeah, so I mean, there's a couple different ways of sharing. If you're running a SAS service, then you know, a central person is coordinating the sharing and things like that. What we tried to do with the, with the Ansible platform is basically enabled the way that people can share content without having to go through a central, you know, agent, if you will. So we provide services and things to help them manage their, their content, you know, with uh, you know, uh, galaxy and collections and things like that. >>Um, it's all about organizing and being able to share content in a way, uh, to make them more efficient. Should I talk about the trends around, um, you've done it. First of all, you done a great job with Ann's book. Congratulations. Um, the big fan of that company and you guys did a good job of it. As it goes full, where you're thinking about cloud complexities as people start looking at the cloud equation, hybrid and cloud 2.0 and the enterprise complexity still is coming as more of it. How do you guys see that? How are you viewing that, um, that marketplace because it's not just one vertical, it's all categories. So how are you guys taking animal to the next level? How you guys look at that, managing those complexities that are around the corner? Yeah. So if you think about it, you know, everybody's moving towards a multi, multi hybrid cloud, you know, sort of configuration, right? >>Um, each one of these platforms and clouds has their own set of tools which work really well perhaps in their particular cloud or their silo or their environment. If you're an organization and you're running multi-cloud, you're responsible for automating things that might span these clouds. You don't want to have different silos of automation tools and teams that only work in one cloud or one environment. So the fact that Ansible can automate across these, both on premise and in the public clouds, multiple public clouds, across domains, network storage, compute, create accounts, uh, you know, do all sorts of things that you're gonna need to do. So it's one automation technology that will span the complexity of those environments. So it really, it's, I don't see how people are going to do it otherwise without fielding lots of people and lots of tools. You know, we were talking with Stephanie and Sue and I talked on our intro insights segment around the word scale has been kicked around, certainly is changing a lot of the landscape on how companies are modernizing the open source equation, but it's also changing the people equation. >>I want you to explain your vision on this because I think this is a key point that we're seeing in our community where people have told us that automation provides great efficiency, et cetera. Good security, but job satisfaction is a real big part of it. You know, people, it's a people challenge. This is about people, your view on scale and people. So organizations are under tremendous pressure right now to do more, right? Whether it's deploying new application faster to close security vulnerabilities faster, uh, to move things around to, to, to right size, you know, resources and applications and things like that. And you know, Ansible allows them to do that in a way where they can be much more efficient and be much more responsive to the business, right? Otherwise, you know, you see some of the customer testimonials here where the amount of time goes down from six hours to five minutes, the teams can be far more productive. >>Um, it, it really gives job satisfaction because they can do things that were almost impossible to automate before by using Ansible to automate network storage and compute in the same playbook. Before, those were three different tools or three teams and people of solving some of the same problems in different areas. And this is where playbooks can be a problem and an opportunity because we have too many playbooks, you have to know which playbook to be available. I mean you can almost have a playbook of playbooks and this is kind of a opportunity to use the sharing collaboration piece. What's your rich to thought on that as that playbook complexity comes in as more playbooks enter the organizations, you know, there's a lot of deployment of the same kind of stack or the same kind of configuration and things like that. So you know, it's really extending community beyond, you know, you know, working on code into working on content, right around automation. >>So if somebody wants to deploy engine X, I think there's over 300 different, you know, playbooks to deploy engine X, right? We don't want to have 5,000 playbooks to deploy engine X. Why can't there be a couple that people take and say, wow, this is perfect. I can tweak it from my organization, integrate my particular systems, and I can hit the ground running instead of trying to either start from a blank page or to go sift through hundreds of almost close, uh, you know, playbooks that do sort of the same thing a lot of times. David's big time. Enormous. Alright. >>So Joe, congratulations on the four years of just continued growth, you know, great momentum in the community wanting to touch on, you know, the, the, the big move, uh, you know, in the last year is, you know, IBM spending, you know, quite a few dollars to, to acquire red hat. What will this mean for kind of the reach and activity around Ansible in the community, the IBM acquisition. >>So IBM had been involved in Ansible in a number of their, you know, products, right? In terms of integration into Ansible. So they have teams and folks within IBM that obviously got Ansible all before the acquisition. Um, I think that it's, it's highly complimentary. IBM has very strong capabilities around management and monitoring, security and things like that. All of those things inevitably turn to automation. Right. Um, so I think it really, um, it only gives us access to IBM and, and they're sort of, you know, their their channel and their accounts in their, and their reach, but also their teams that have these, these sets of technologies, um, that are natural compliment, you know, whether it's Watson driving Ansible or security or network monitoring, driving Ansible automation. It's a really powerful combination. >>Yeah. I also just want to get your kind of macro level view on automation. I sat on a panel talking to CIS admins about careers and it was the number one thing that they felt they needed to embrace. We see like the RPA community probably in adjacency to what you see heavily pushing automation, uh, you know, help explain how important automation is and that it's not, you know, just a silver bullet also. >>Yeah. So, you know, a lot of times people are, you know, the, the sort of the easy, um, you know, description is automation's gonna eliminate jobs or things like that. I think it's more like sort of the power tool analogy. You know, you know, if you had a, you know, a hammer and a screwdriver before, now you've got a power screwdriver and a pneumatic hammer and uh, you know, all sorts of additional things. They're force multipliers for these people to do broader, bigger things faster, right? Um, and that's what every organization is driving them to do. How agile can you be our competition deployed something, how fast can we deploy it and how many, you know, new releases a week. Can we deploy, um, when security hits, you know, how fast can we close the vulnerabilities that hours, days, weeks, or can we do it in minutes? >>The old expression, if you, if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But if you're an agile, you can adjust to figure out the opportunity. It's kind of awesome kind of quote there. This speaks to the changes. I want to get your thoughts. Last question for you is, as someone who's been in the industry for awhile, we've first interviewed and I think 2014 at OpenStack when we first started chatting around the industry. So much has changed now more than ever. The modern enterprise is looking at cloud impact, operating as an operating model, cloud one, Datto, Amazon compute, storage standups software, and they're piece of cake startups. We're doing it now as enterprises really want to crack the code on cloud software automation. Observability these new categories are emerging, kind of speaks to this cloud 2.0, how would you describe that to folks if, if asked, what's the modern era enterprise cloud architecture look like? >>What is cloud 2.0, how would you take a stab at that definition? So I would say after all these years, cloud is really entering its infancy and what does that mean? We're just starting now to appreciate what can be built in cloud and we're going to get a big boost soon with five G, which is gonna, you know, increase the amount of data, the amount of, uh, you know, edge devices, uh, IOT and things like that. Um, the cloud is becoming, you know, the first choice for people when they build their architectures and their business. Um, it's gonna fundamentally change everything. So I think, you know, some people, what's the quote? You know, some people overestimate, you know, what the technology can do in the short term and underestimate what it can do in the longterm. We're now getting to that point where people are starting to build some really powerful cloud based applications. See this as a big wave then big time wave. Yeah. I mean, we had a quote still on the cube last week. Data is the new software, so software, abstractions, automation. This is the new way. I mean, it's a whole new architecture. So exciting. Thanks for coming on the cube. Appreciate juncture having thanks. We're here at the Asheville Fest, the Cuban Chalfont stupid men. Break it down. The analysis, getting into the automation for all conversation. Big category developing. We're covering it here. Live back more after this short break.

>>live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the Q covering answerable Best 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat >>Welcome back. Everyone's cubes Live coverage here in Atlanta for answerable fest. Here's cube covers of red hats. Event around automation for all I'm John for a stupid man. Our next guest is Joe Fitzgerald cable. Um, vice President General manager of the management business Unit at Red Hat. Great timing for answerable. Great to have you back on the Cube. Good to see you. Thanks, Mom. Thanks for >>having me. It's great to have you here. A danceable fast, super >>tight before camera timing about answerable to do And I did our intro analysis and platform ization of automation. Big, big move, Big news. But there's a bigger trend at play here around automation. Why is the timing now for automation discussions danceable. So good. >>The demand for automation is so broad in enterprises right there trying to do everything from, you know, Dev ops tool chains to io ti devices trying deploy things faster, you know, fix security vulnerabilities faster. It's all about speed, agility, efficiency. It all comes back to automation >>and the news here is the general availability of the available November as announced on Keynote of the Answer Automation Platform. So this is something that's been going on for a while, and it's just been grown. Now it's a platform. What's in the platform? Why is it important? Why should customers care? >>So you know, we've been on this journey with answerable, which started off. Is this incredibly simple, elegant architecture and a way to automate things and what's happened over the past couple of years? It's exploded in terms of the number of people who are using it, the number people who are generating automation, integration. And so in working with a lot of customers, right. What we saw the need for was really to help them collaborate and scale there. Automation efforts scale. You know who could build re you share, score content and track it really important. So we put a lot of those efforts into the platform to take it to the next level. Really? You >>know, we've been talking about answerable comes stew going back when 2014 open stack. I think I remember were first talk about the Cube. It had a cult following. When it emerged, you guys acquired it what the next year? 2015? Roughly. Um, but Ansel had this cult following of people who just love to get into the configuration side of things. Make them go better. You guys acquired it, Done well with that. Kept it going that the community fly. We'll keep rolling a lot of progress and say So. What do you most proud of? What's the most notable things of the growth of the answerable journey? What's what's the big story there? >>So it's almost four years since Red had acquired danceable. And I remember when I proposed acquiring answerable insult was this small? You know, Eastern U S company with sort of, ah, community cult following, but very small in terms of commercials and reach and stuff like that mostly focused on the configuration space. Like a lot of the other automation tools over the past four years. Probably the best thing we did that redhead is really good at is we let the community do with community does best, right? The innovation, the number of contributors, the amount of answerable integration modules, playbooks has exploded, right? If you were in the keynote this morning, it was number six on the you know, repositories list out of 100 million almost, you know, just a massive amount of projects. And here it is at number six. So we didn't perturb the community. We actually helped it grow. And we've been able to help the technology evolved from a config automation product in technology into this very broad spectrum. Now, enterprise automation platform that crosses domains like networks and security and storage and cloud and windows just a phenomenal growth in it. >>So help explain how platforms sets up answerable for its future. They talked in the keynote a little bit about starting with some of the kind of core partners and the collections that they're offering. But in the future, for a platform to really be a platform, it needs to be something that users themselves can build on top of so, you know, help us understand where it is today when it first announced here for November, and where it shows shall be going in the future. >>So we didn't use the platform word lightly. I think that, you know, platform has a set of connotations, and it's sort of a set of requirements. What we saw was that different teams and groups inside organizations were bringing Ansel in and using the technology and having very good success in their particular area. Then what we saw was thes. Teams were trying to share automation and collaborate across organizations. Then, even in the community, there's tens of thousands of roles and play books out there that the community has built. There might be 300 that do the same thing, which is the best one, which, which one of people using How successful is that? How long does it take? What we found was that they needed a bunch of tools to be able to collaborate, track analytics about stuff so that they could share and collaborate at a higher scale. >>Yeah, that's one of the great value proposition when we talk about SAS is if it's done well, not only can I share internally, but I can learn from others that have used the platform and make it easier to take advantage of that. So it is that part of that vision that you see with the platform? >>Yes, so I mean, there's a couple of ways of sharing. If you're running a sass service, then you know a central person is coordinating the sharing and things like that. What we try to do with Sensible Platform is basically enable a way that people can share content without having to go through a central you know, agent, if you will. So we provide service is and things to help them manage there. They're content, you know, with galaxy and collections and things like that. It's all about organizing and being able to share content in a way to make them more efficient. >>You're talking about the trends around. You've done it for a while, you know, great job. And congratulations, big fan of that company. And you guys did a good job with it as it goes full where you're thinking about cloud complexities as people start looking at the cloud equation hybrid and cloud 2.0, on the enterprise, complexity still is coming. There's more of it. How do you guys see that? How you viewing that that marketplace? Because it's not just one vertical. It's all categories. So how are you guys taking animals? The next level how you guys look at that? Managing those complexities that are around the corner? >>Yes. So if you think about it. You know, everybody's moving towards a multi hybrid cloud, you know, sort of configuration, right? Each one of these platforms and clouds has their own set of tools, which worked really well, perhaps in their particular cloud or their silo, where their environment. If you're an organization and you're running multi cloud, you're responsible for automating things that might span these clouds. You don't want to have different silos of automation tools and teams that only work in one cloud or one environment. So the fact that answerable can automate across thes both on premise and in the public clouds multiple public clouds across domains, network storage, compute, create accounts, you know, do all sorts of things that you're gonna need to do. So it's one automation technology that will span the complexity of those environments. So it really it's I don't see how people gonna do it otherwise, without fielding lots of people and lots of tools. >>You know, we're talking with Stephanie, and soon I talked on our intro insights segment around. The word scale has been kicked around certainly is changing a lot of the landscape on how couples heir modernizing the open source equation, but it's also changing the people equation. I want you to explain your vision on this because I think this is a key point that we're seeing in our community, where people have told us that automation provides great efficiency, etcetera, good security. But job satisfaction is a real big part of it. You know people. It's a people challenge. This is about people, your view on scale and people. So >>organizations are under tremendous pressure right now to doom or right whether it's deployed new application faster, too close security vulnerabilities faster to move things around. T right side's resource is and applications and things like that. And, you know, answerable allows them to do that in a way where they could be much more efficient and be much more responsive to the business. Right? Otherwise, you know, you see some of the customer testimonials here where the amount of time goes down from six hours to five minutes, the teams could be far more productive, productive. It really gives job satisfaction because they can do things that were almost impossible to automate before by using insult, automate network storage and compute in the same playbook. Before, those were three different tools or three teams, >>and people are solving some of the same problems in different areas. And this is where playbooks can be a problem and an opportunity. Because we have too many playbooks. You know which playbook be available? You could almost have a playbook of playbooks. This is kind of ah, opportunity that used the sharing collaboration piece What you're Richard thought on this as that playbook complexity comes in as little playbooks enter the >>organizations. You know, there's a lot of deployment of the same kind of stack or the same kind of configuration and things like that. So, you know, it's really extending community beyond, you know, you know, working on code into working on content, right around automation. So if somebody wants to employ Engine X, I think there's over 300 different playbooks to deploy Engine X right. We don't wanna have 5000 playbooks to deploy Engine X. Why can't there be a couple that people take and say, Wow, this is perfect. I can tweak it for my organization, integrate my particular systems, and I can hit the ground running instead of trying to either start from a blank page. Let's go sift through hundreds of almost close playbooks. That sort of the same thing A >>lot of times, David. Big time. Enormous. >>So, Joe, you know, congratulations on the four years of just continued growth, you know, great momentum in the community wanting to touch on. You know, the big move, you know, in the last year is, you know, IBM spending, you know, quite a few dollars to acquire red hat. What will this mean for kind of the reach and activity around answerable in the community, the IBM acquisition. >>So IBM had been involved in answerable in a number of their products, right in terms of integration into danceable. So they have teams and folks within IBM that obviously got and some old before the acquisition. I think that it's it's highly complimentary. IBM has very strong capabilities, room management and monitoring security and things like that. All those things inevitably turned to automation, right? So I think it really it only gives us access to IBM in their sort of their channel and their accounts in their reach, but also their teams that have these sets of technologies that are natural complement, you know, whether it's Watson driving Ansel or security or network monitoring, driving danceable automation. It's a really powerful combination. >>Yeah, I just want to get your kind of macro level view on automation. I sat on a panel talking to sys. Admin is about careers, and it was the number one thing that they felt they needed to embrace. We see, like the r p a community, probably an adjacency toe. What you see, heavily pushing automation, you know, help explain. You know what? How important automation is in that it's it's not, you know, just a silver bullet also. >>Yeah. So, you know, a lot of times people are, you know, the sort of the easy description is automation is gonna eliminate jobs or things like that. I think it's more like sort of the power tool analogy. You know, you know, if you had a you know, a hammer and a screwdriver before now you've got a power screwdriver and automatic camera, and you know all sorts of additional things. Their force multipliers for these people to do broader, bigger things faster, right? Um and that's what every organization is driving them to do. How agile can be our competition deployed. Something How fast can we deploy it? How many new releases a week Can we deploy when security hits? You know how fast we closed the vulnerabilities of hours, days, weeks or we do it in minutes. >>The old expression. If you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But if you're an agile hammer, you can adjust the figure out. The opportunity is kind of awesome. Kind of quote there. This speaks to the changes. I want to get your thoughts. Last question for you is that someone's been in the industry a while. We first interviewed nothing 2014 and open staff when we first started chatting around the industry. So much has changed. Now more than ever, the modern enterprise is looking at cloud impact, operating as an operating model cloud one Dato Amazon Compute storage stand up software and there piece of cake start ups were doing it. Now it's enterprises really want to crack the code on cloud software automation, observe abilities, new categories emerging kind of speaks to this cloud. 2.0, how would you describe that to folks, if if asked, what's the modern error enterprise Cloud architecture look like? What is cloud two point. Oh, how would you take a stab at that definition? So >>I would say after all these years, Cloud is really entering its infancy. And what does that mean? We're just starting now to appreciate what can be built on cloud. And we're gonna get a big boost soon with five g, which is gonna increase the amount of data, the amount of edge devices I ot and things like that the cloud is becoming, you know, the first choice for people. When they build their architecture in the business, it's gonna fundamentally change everything. So I think you know some people. What what's the quote? You know, some people overestimate You know what a technology can do in the short term and underestimate what it can do in the long term. We're now getting to that point where people are going to build some really powerful, cloud based applicator. >>You see, this is a big wave that big time twice. Yeah. I mean, we had a quote stew on the Cube last week. Date is the new software software abstractions. Automation. This is the new way means the whole new architecture so exciting. Thanks for coming on the key Appreciate Just for having. We're here at the animal fests Acute I'm Jumper Stewed Minutemen breaking down The analysis. Getting into the automation for all conversation. Big category developing. We're covering here. Live with more after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering your Red Hat Summit 2019, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Well, good afternoon, welcome back here on theCUBE. As we continue live coverage from Boston. We're at Red Hat Summit 2019. I'm John Walls along with Stu Miniman. It's been so good to have you here for all three days of our exclusive coverage of this exciting event, great event it's been. We're joined by Joe Fitzgerald who's the VP of and GM management business unit at the Red Hat. Joe, good to see you sir. >> Good afternoon. >> Pleasure, thanks for having us here at this, and it's been a great show. I hope the same can be said from your side of the fence. I'd like to hear about that. we're talking earlier but announcements and whatever. Tell me, what's your feel for the flavor, what happened here, and all that you've heard in terms of the keynotes stage and some of the big news. >> It's really that I am a great bunch here. I mean we really had some big announcements. My area of management automation really complements the platform announcements that we made. As people are deploying stuff across really complex environments and multi clouds, management automation like becomes really important for them to keep all that running and compliance secure. So I'm pretty excited that my area was able to compliment the platform offerings that we announced in a really big way. >> Now, you look now you look ahead to the road coming, right? So this is new world, great opportunity, great challenge, but it I would think you guys a pretty jazzed about being central to that right? And becoming this kind of a new layer, new part, and new piece of that equation. >> Yeah, Red Hat's really, you know, at a key point in terms of IT infrastructures and what people are doing. You can definitely feel the excitement in our customers, in our partners that what they're trying to build and this is not the end, this is really the beginning of where everybody's going. I mean, really, the open chips announcements we made these are platforms that people are building the future on. So this story is really got a long way to go, right, and there is just a tremendous amount of excitement. We're really on the front edge of what people building, how they're digitally transforming their business. And they're building that stuff on our platform which is really exciting to see. >> So, Joe, you know when we look at some of the big themes we've been talking about here at the show, you know you mentioned some of the big announcements, but you know, the world is more heterogeneous and more complex than it ever was in a multi-cloud environment. And therefore if I look at management specifically, you know, we know in the IT industry it's been something that for decades we've been trying to talk about. How do I simplify things? When I talk to my friends that are admins, you know the joke is, how do you spell single pane of glass? You know P-A-I-N, never what you would think it would be. So, explain how in you know in this ever complex, multi-cloud environment, you know Red Hat is helping to progress the journey of management? >> Sure, so it's an area that is near and dear to me. So every time there is these great technological innovations, the platform, or the application, or the process level. There is a secondary effect which is the management changes, the physics of the environments change. And then the management has to adapt to those new physics. So as people are taking advantage of all these great new public cloud services, and private cloud services, and hyper clouds, and multi-cloud. The management complexity of trying to manage something that is now distributed across all different platforms and all kinds of management tools and interfaces and each one of those platforms. Somebody has to sort that out where that will become a barrier, to people trying to leverage that to advance their business. So Red Hat, is sort of in an interesting place, at the crossroads of things like analytics and automation, to help bring some technology innovations to helping to manage these really complex environments. >> You know, so, can you just put in a framework for us because if we say there are so many pieces of the stack and so many distributed environments, there have been management tools that have become central to administrator roles. You know, I think of if I'm a network person, there's you know certain company that is rather dominant in the space. Same thing when it came to server virtualization and today the multi-cloud where every public cloud has their own dashboards. You know, and the data center there are lots of tools so, you know, where does Red Hat fit in that overall picture? And you know, what would be different than people that know Red Hat from just a few years ago? >> Sure, so I think you know, Red Hat's philosophy of open hybrid is really key even in management. You know, each platform sort of has invested interest in sort of trying to lock you in and providing set of tools that selfishly manage their stuff but nobody else's stuff. Red Hat is really in the business about enabling hybrid cloud and hybrid applications across these clouds. And so what that means is that we have to provide management that enables them to cross those clouds and manage in a comprehensive, unified way. And a lot of management innovation is taking place in open, just like most other innovations. So some of the open innovation technologies like Ansible for example, right have like incredible growth in the community, and the kinds of automation we can do across all these clouds and across layers of the stack, totally in an open source solution is really amazing. >> So you talk about hybrid and you're talking about management and smart management in way here, but that seems to me like that should just come with the territory right? We're going to make you smart and we're going to have you, give you better tools to make sure that you have your efficiencies and your operations, and everything is going just as it should. Like that's like, duh. But yet, it's much more than that, I like curious about your perspective on truly what defines smart management, and how that comes into practice? >> Yeah so, smart management for us means an easy way for people to manage a state of systems that deployed across all these different kinds of clouds. Private, public, physical, virtual environments, it gets very complicated. And it sounds like it should be easy, right, to make smart management, but it's really hard to make something easy, when you have the level of complexity that all these environments sort of extrude, right? So it's hard, right? And what you've seen over the decades is that as the paradigms change, management technologies change along he way, right? So we're in the middle of sort of a paradigm shift in terms of how people think of automation. The speed, scale, and complexity of these environments is so high now, that you certainly can't do it with people. You know, following things around. You know, the speed at which vulnerabilities need to be addressed, or the way that things need to be deployed, or scaled up or down, or managed, it defies people running around. So it all has to be automated. You're seeing a lot of other technologies like analytics and AI type technologies being applied to take all the data from these environments, figure out what's going on and then turn around and drive automation into those environments. >> So, Joe, when I look at the keynote there is something that jumped out at me. You were talking a lot about the, going to cloud.redhat.com. They started out with a windows interface, which you know Satya Nadella is up on stage, but still being at the linux conference here is that the core underneath everything. You know, sure it's going mobile and you want to make sure everyone can do it, but, you know, maybe talk a little about the importance of, you know, working even from a windows standpoint and part of the overall SAS delivery model for how management works today. >> Yeah, so I think there's a couple things going on. First of all, you know, certainly in our consumer lives we're used to ease of use. You know, very simple interfaces whether that's voice, or mobile, or whatever it is. We need things fast and we need things easy. Okay, that crosses over into the management realm as well. Okay, we need to make things frictionless. We need to really take the time and the cognitive load off people trying to manage these environments. Okay, so what you saw in our announcements across the board was this, reduction of fiction, this ease of use, the simplicity in the way you build, deploy, and manage use these systems. Okay, which allows people to focus not on the task of build the infrastructure, which is very interesting, but actually advancing their business needs. You know, writing that next application, or scaling it, or you know, making changes to compete at speeds that you really couldn't do before because of the manual impediments and all the process changes. >> And how are the pressures changing, from the management side of the fence? Because of the volume of data, the number of transactions that are occurring, just that shear scope to me, puts a whole different kind of onus on the responsibility to make sure these processes are occurring naturally, and accurately. You got on one hand you're making some really big promises about how secure this environment is going to be, how effective it's going to be, and now you got to back that up. So it seems like you're shine, or at least your side of the fence, shining a little brighter light and putting a little burden on the backs of your tools and your folks. >> Well, so we're leveraging technologies. So for a case of, you know, of managing and securing these environments, using things like analytics. Like one of the things we announced this week was the ability with our Red Hat insights offering now which is bundled with RHEL, to be able to analyze these environments and figure out whether they have vulnerability, or performance, or reliability issues ahead of time predictively. And then be able to automatically address it and remediate it, that's really powerful. That saves somebody running a report to see which systems might have vulnerabilities and then trying to figure out what to do with that , and then scheduling some jobs to go fix some stuff, and meanwhile somebody has been going in their network or going into their systems quite some time. >> Right. >> So it's all that speed and leveraging technology that help do these things. >> All right so, Joe, glad you brought up analytics. Let's go back to that discussion of automation and Ansible. Help connect us the dots, you know, is there, I haven't heard like AI and ML. You know maybe Red Hat is trying to make sure they don't AI wash things too much, but where does analytics fit into automation these days? So, the future, I think is basically you know, we have a lot of data from these environments and all different levels of everything from the hardware, to the software, to the clouds, the apps, the usage patterns and things like that where a wash in data. Okay, so everybody is trying to bring analytics to things like their business, or bring it to things like infrastructure and things like that. There's an explosion of analytics use across, you know, every industry vertical, across technology. I see analytics coming up with tremendous insights into what's going on into environment or business. The next thing after that will be, I need to change something, or fix something, or scale up or down, or optimize, or do something. That backs into automation. So I think that, you know things like Ansible, are a natural to plug into analytic systems that come up with incredible insights, or actions that need to be taken. What's a standard way I can do that automation? Ansible would be my answer. >> Yeah so, you know, when I read some of the other analysts in the industry look at this space, they float out this term AIOps. Do you agree with that terminology? Is that fit into the framework you were just talking about? If not just taking the data, but being able to have that automation take action? >> Yeah so, I think it's a direction, you know, I think, you know, in the news recently there's been automation gone wrong. You see it occasionally where automation, if it's not, you know, doesn't have the right sort of checks and balances can do bad things really fast. Just like it can do good things really fast. So, I think that there's sort of a crawl, walk, run, for a lot of these things. Where people say, okay, you have this result from analytics or AI, it's recommending an action, let me confirm that, and I'll go ahead and take the action. Overtime people become more comfortable with these closed looped systems and then just say, okay, you know what you're doing there, go ahead and automate that. They can move on to a higher level, you know, function. >> Just one follow up on that, you know, RPA is something we've been taking a look at. It's a hot space and getting a lot of development. Are there any connections between what Red Hat's doing and the ecosystem with some of the RPA solutions out there? >> So it's sort of adjacent to the RPA space. You know, this year I would say automation is at the top of most enterprises list. And you know it's a spectrum of automating their traditional, sometimes legacy processes, to squeeze cost out. So they can move some of those people and some of that money to do their differentiating digital transforming, you know, applications, that are going to put them ahead of their competitors. Right, so we're seeing automations replace old tools that they have for perhaps, you know a decade or more, to the front edge where they're using our tools and you know devops tool chains to deploy things multiple times a day. Right? So, automation across the board I think is a high priority for enterprises right now. >> Can you make this easier for me? If you're writing all this great insight, right, and predictive analytics and but I've got data coming in from all kinds of places. And all of a sudden I've got to go find all these reports right? I've gotta, can you consolidate at all? Can you simplify my search if you will, or make my job of monitoring any easier just because maybe I have a lot more data coming in that I'm used to? I might want it a little more simplified, or at least laid out so it is a little clearer for me. >> Well I think there is two things going on. On the data side we're putting a lot more, you know, software in place to evaluate data and to get insights out of the data. Okay, on the automation side, you know, as we were talking about management tools over the years, there's been scripting languages and programming languages. And automation was really almost a programming exercise. One of the things that we've done in the Ansible environment is we sort of democratized automation. In other words, we made it easy for non-programmers to be able to do automation. So now I don't have to get programmers, which are expensive, and in short supply these days to write automation. I can expand that to ops teams and QE teams and I can democratize automation. So I think the physics there are putting more software, analyzing data, deriving insights. Whether that's machine learning, or full AI, or simple linear regression, and some other techniques, to get out of the data what's going on, and then turn that into actionable automation. >> Well congratulations to the Red Hat team. Good week. The summit I'm sure it went well for you as well and job well done, and good luck down the road. I know you've got your hands full now, but it's a good kind of full right? >> It's an exciting time to be at Red Hat and thank you very much. >> You betcha, thank you. Back with more from Red Hat Summit 2019. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat techno music)

(indistinct chatter, electronic intro music) >> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's the Cube! Covering Red Hat summit 2018, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hello and welcome back this is the Cube's exclusive coverage here in San Francisco, California at Moscone West, I'm John Furrier with John Troyer co-founder of Tech Reckoning and our next guest is Joe Fitzgerald, vice president and general manager of the management and business unit at Red Hat, home of Ansible, among other great capabilities, welcome to the Cube, thanks for stopping by. Red Hat summit 2018's happening all the buzz is all about Kubernetes, containers, obviously Linux, and all the action really transforming the digital journey of customers. I mean, cloud scale: check, data: check, (chuckling) new applications: check, a lot of interesting things now, Kubernetes' workload, multi cloud, all kind of coming together, what's going on for you guys in the show, 'cause you know honestly management, operations, automation, these are all things that are data driven, your thoughts? >> Joe: Yeah, so I'm responsible for management and automation, and so all these technologies that you're hearing about, Red Hat is helping people digitally transform, right, so a lot of the technologies you mentioned, it turns out that these envorironments really require automation to move fast, right, and management is essential to keep these really complex environments up and running, and secure, which is a big issue for people. >> Furrier: IT operations has been around for a while but it's always been, like, managing the data center, but now you've got a lot of things going on. Management, operations, and data is changing the world because now you can apply automation to it, what's a customer to do here? Because a lot of people are recasting, and I won't say replatformizing, but they're definitely looking at a global, cloud native, with containers, legacy is taken care of, how do I instrument this? What is the approach that you guys see customers taking from Red Hat's perspective? >> Joe: Well there's a couple of principles, automation is huge and it's entering because automation on the front edge, getting the containers and cloud services, automation is huge, but we also see automation for people to reduce the burden of their legacy environments, by using automation to free up resources and people, and money that they can put into their front end, you know, digital transformation activities. Right? The other thing besides automation that we're driving is analytics based operations, because these environments, once you build them, and start operating them, get very complex very fast, right? So it's beyond somebody sitting in front of a network console waiting for red lights to come up on the dashboard and reacting. It really has to be automated, and they have to get a lot of insights into what's going on. >> Furrier: It's an interesting challenge, I want to get into the hybrid cloud for a second, because before we get into hybrid cloud challenges, automation is a double edged sword, you can automate something and all of a sudden you could have a memory leak and you don't even know about it, because it's self healing! There's a lot of automation going on, so the analytics have to be smarter. This why we've been hearing this come up a lot, which is 'Okay, I need visibility not just into what's happening, what's breaking, but what's going on beyond the automation.'. These are new dynamics, what's the approach there? How are you guys looking at that trend? Is there any products out there to solve this challenge? >> Joe: So we've had product in our portfolio, it's Red Hat insights, which is a predictive analytics based offering that we've had, and basically what it does is it analyzes our customer's systems and it looks across, you know, sort of a broad set of settings and processes, and configurations and things, and basically can actually tell them 'Hey, these systems are at risk, they're likely to either have performance issues or a crash, or they have security vulnerabilities', and actually tell them what's going to happen, and what they need to do. So that's called Red Hat Insights, as the name implies gives you a very, you know, deep insight into your systems. We've recently tied that to automation, to say 'This is what's wrong with your systems, would you like us to automate and correct them or remediate them?'. Now I can tell you, having been around automation for a while most people don't trust automation. Think about the first time your going to get in your self driving car, and you're going to go 'Wait a minute, I'm going to not have a steering wheel or brake pedal or something?'. That's, like, terrifying right? Automation in IT's the same way, it's like 'Wait, I'm going to have this system do what to my production systems?', so there's usually this cycle where it's like, show me what you're going to do with the automation. Let me get sort of comfortable and verify it, and then let me push the button and then automate it, that's a natural cycle. >> Troyer: Lets go down one level from that and talk about hybrid cloud, so, we see a lot of examples of that, hybrid cloud, multi cloud, on-prem with OpenStack, you know, out in the public cloud with OpenShift, you know, multiple clouds at once. So, you've got your self driving cloud now. One layer down, what do enterprises and IT operators need to look at from a governance and an operations perspective? What are things they need to be worried about if they're going to be running a multi cloud scale operation like that? >> Joe: So let me use the self driving car analogy. Lets say you bought a self driving car from three different car manufacturers. Okay, the instrumentation and the hardware, the software, is all going to be vastly different, but you're supposed to operate those things at a consistent level. So think about a hybrid cloud, all these clouds have different instrumentation, how they get monitored and managed, and the kind of events they generate >> Troyer: The cost models. >> The cost models, all those things, so it's not like you can just write a simple piece of code and say 'Oh just monitor these things' or 'Just make sure they're secure' or compliant, you have to actually instrument into each of the cloud particular, you know, instrumentations, right? And then try to automate that, so one of the things we do is we provide sort of consistent way for people to manage what's otherwise a pretty complex heterogeneous hybrid cloud environment. >> Furrier: And how's that going? Can you give us some anecdotal insight into how that's going? >> Joe: Well it's going very well, we have a number of customers here at summit who are talking about, sort of, their production journeys with Red Hat. Transforming, whether it's on OpenStack for private cloud or OpenShift for containers, or using our middleware services or integration services, and then using our management and automation to actually deploy those things, keep them secure, keep them operational, and run them at scale, it's those huge success points. >> Furrier: Joe, Ansible's been a very successful acquisition for Red Hat, what's the status or the future plans, any updates on Ansible? Its role, its relevance, and so forth? >> Joe: So Ansible's a great story, so Ansible was an open source company, very smart people, very innovative technology, strong community. Red Hat acquired the company about 2 1/2 years ago, and one of the things that we did was we didn't screw it up, right? A lot of times big companies acquire small companies and they basically crush the innovation and they kill whatever the unique thing that company was doing. In this case what we've done is, because Red Hat's so good at open source, and we've actually nurtured that community. We've actually helped that community grow, virally. So the amount of contributors to the community has grown significantly, the amount of integration activities, interest in that community has grown wildly over the past 2 1/2 years. So I think our biggest thing is, we let it do what it's really good at, and we've nurtured it, so we've taken a really smart team with some great technology and we've amplified that with the Red Hat, you know, sort of capabilities. >> Furrier: What was the secret sauce on that? 'Cause this is a really, kind of, hard thing to do. Acquisitions can get mangled a bit, and founders leave, and what did you guys do specifically to not screw it up? Was it leave them alone? Invest some tech? You mentioned nurturing, what specifically did you guys do, looking back at that, that was the secret to that success? >> Joe: So I, having been personally acquired three times, right? I joined Red Hat through acquisition over five years ago, so I've been here a while. When I did the Ansible acquisition I wanted to make sure that what we didn't do was break anything, so a lot of times, in acquisitions, they tend to take the new company apart, and they say 'Okay, marketing moves over to corporate marketing, engineering moves over here, product management moves over there.' and they sort of take the transmission apart, and then they wonder why the engine's not running anymore, why the car's not running anymore. And so the first thing was: don't break anything. Let's understand it, let's understand how it fits in. I also think there was a good culture match. There was a good impedance match, for the fact that they were smart open source guys. So the Red Hat way was, like >> Furrier: So they got Red Hat? >> Yeah, they got Red Hat, and a number of them were ex Red Hatters, I mean, we have a lot of Red Hatters that go off and start up very interesting projects because of their background, and sometimes they come home. And this was that kind of case. >> Furrier: That's good, that's a great practice. I've got to say I've seen many acquisitions mangled, you know, it's the same exact thing, just go to the playbook, they tear them apart. >> Joe: Yeah it doesn't usually end well. You know, when large company acquires small company. >> So I'm curious how you all are looking at the role of the IT admin/operator in this new world, this new cloud data world we're going to, you know, the people formerly known as sysadmins, you know, I think they thought about automation a lot with maybe day zero, like setting things up. But now we've got day one and beyond, you know, we've got to run these clouds. Does IT become full of SRE's and operators? How are you dealing with your community and training them and teaching them how to go to work with a new environment? >> Joe: Yeah so the world has gotten significantly more complicated for those folks, right? In the good old days they were sort of segmented, maybe, into compute, network, and storage teams, and now you've got like, the public cloud team, and the private cloud team, and the container team, and the different teams, right? So the complexity has been amplified, right? What we're trying to do is, we're trying to reduce that complexity by things like Ansible, that basically can automate across those domains. So we introduced Ansible network automation, you can automate storage, you can automate compute, you can do stuff in private cloud, physical servers, different layers with the same set of tools. That means that a person, instead of being a generalist, or specialist, can be what Gartner calls a versitalist. They can actually be good at a number of domains, and in this case with a single tool set, without having to learn five different tools. >> Furrier: Joe, great to have you on the Cube. Thanks for the insights, great to hear your perspective, final question for you; AI, machine learning, always a big part of analytics, are you guys doing anything there? What's the update on what's coming? Because Automation, you've got to love machine learning, got to love some of this software. You guys doing anything in particular, notable, that you want to share? That's worth highlighting? >> Joe: Yeah we showed some stuff in our keynote here, in terms of demos, but we're really driving towards algorithmic IT operations. We're going to keep applying analytics, building towards machine learning and AI for these complex environments. We have some really smart people internally, data scientists and experts, we have a lot of expertise because we're building some of these platforms, and the new technologies. We have a lot of customers, they trust us, they share data with us, so we're really looking forward to advancing this sort of AI ops discipline. >> And the trend as your friend, the winds at your back, whatever you want to call it, you see in Kubernetes, you see in the kind of decomposition of services down to the very low granular level, throw some instrumentation on it, you now have data, data's good right? >> Joe: Speed of transformation is getting faster. >> Joe Fitzgerald, Vice President and General Manager of the management business unit here at Red Hat, on the Cube, sharing his insights here in the Cube, I'm John Furrier with John Troyer, stay with us for more live coverage after this short break. (outro music)

>> We wanted to compete against the last >> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2017, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Red Hat Summit. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We are here today with Joe Fitzgerald. He is the Vice President of Management at Red Hat. Thanks so much for joining us, Joe. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, I want to talk to you about automating the enterprise. This is really right in your wheelhouse. You came out with a few new product announcements this morning. Tell us more about those. >> So, as all these technologies change, it really puts a lot of pressure on enterprising to try and figure out how to manage all this stuff. IF you think about the complexity and the rate of change, it's a lot harder to follow that around with management and security in automation. So we have this vision around enterprise automation, which I'm really excited to talk about. >> So tell us more. How does it help reduce the workload or at least automate the workload, maybe? >> Well, so automation, if you think of what's going on in other sectors like self-driving cars or home automation, what's happening is you have these silos of automation that are now being sort of composed into systems of automation. One of the challenges that enterprises have faced for years is they've got lots of tools, sometimes dozens of tools that each tool is good at automating one little thing. So it's kind of like your cruise control on your car or your nav system or something like that but they don't talk to each other. So what we announced to day is we have this vision, and it's going to take time for people to get there, but they need to move towards enterprise automation. And there's some fundamentally new technology over the past coupla years that we're leveraging called Ansible, which will allow us to automate across many domains and tie things together. >> Rebecca: So that's the vision. >> Right. >> How will it work? >> Well, we actually announced some products today that are huge delivery and part of that vision, which is we announced CloudForms 4.5, which has Ansible inside. Ansible is this incredibly popular open-source technology that's sort of taken the world by storm. It's a couple years old, but it's gotten this incredible open-source community adoption, which Red Hat is certainly familiar with. We acquired this company about a year and a half ago and under Red Hat's nurturing, because we're really good at open-source, this things has really exploded in terms of the interest in the community. At the same time, we're seeing enterprises now adopt it in incredible rates. So they're telling us, "Look, we want this technology. "And it can help us automate everything "from our network to our compute and our storage. "We can use it in clouds. "We can use it on our physical stuff. "We can automate some of our old things "which are dragging us down, "as well as some of these really cool differentiating "new applications they're trying to get out." >> Joe, the headline in the press release says that this is analytics-driven automation, so talk about the operational impact here. Do I need to get a data scientist on my team now to manage all my things? Where does this fit with what they're doing today and how do they take advantage of it? >> That's a great question. So the second product announcement that we made, it's around an offering we have called Red Hat Insights, and it's a predictive analytics capability. So if you think about Red Hat's experience, we have tens of thousands of customers worldwide. We've dealt with millions of cases, we've got really smart engineers working in all these different technologies. In collecting data from our customers, we use big data, machine learning to derive insights into what's going on. Now we can analyze systems for our customers and tell them what's wrong. As the name implies, it gives them insights into what's going on. They don't have to hire data scientists, we have really smart people. But by basically getting insights into those system, we could tell you, "Hey the system's not secure "or it has some performance problems." But you would have to then go make changes to fix it. With this announcement today, we've tied together Ansible technology around automation so that we can say, "Here's what you need to change. "Would you like us to change it?" And we then dynamically generate the changes necessary. >> Joe, this resonates for me so much. I lived back a dozen years ago, I worked in an interoperability lab for a large storage company that's a partner of yours and we were like, "Well, we have a little bit of data "about what the customer's doing, "we know exactly how stuff should be configured," but matching that patches and early on in the API cycle, trying to figure that out, make sure that we could remediate or hey, is there a security issue or some patch that they should know about? Getting that flow of information just didn't exist 10, 12 years ago. So, why now? How can we make it better? You know, what's the impact going to be for the customers? >> So a coupla things. First of all, there's new technology. So this Ansible technology I described is fundamentally different. We believe that that can help us across a lot of different domains to automate. I think the other thing is that automation tools have been very, very difficult for people to use, and you hear about continuous development, continuous integration. You probably haven't heard much about continuous management or continuous automation or continuous security. Those things need to be automated. If you're going to be changing at the rate businesses would like to change, you're going to need some really new tools to be able to automate those things at the speed of business. >> Absolutely. I think that the joke I've had is, "Hey, what version of AWS are you running on? "Or what version of Azure you're running on?" They take care of that. The enterprise, there's some stuff that they're going to do internal, there's some stuff that they're going to do in the public cloud, but they need to be able to get to that newer version. My friends that are in security are always like, "The biggest challenge is right. "I haven't gotten that latest update "or there's some vulnerability that I need to do "so I need to have more that CICD mentality "in some of the other spaces." >> If you think the rate of change right now between multi-clouds, containers, new processes like DevOps, I mean there's just an incredible amount of technology changing. And a lot of the tools enterprises have, some of them are 10, 15 years old. They didn't even have these things around when those tools were created so they can't really deal with the physics of these new environments and how to do it. Now you can get a tool from each vendor or each cloud or each platform to manage it, but now you're the person who's got this arsenal of tools with teams that have to learn 27 tools. And then, your security example is a great one. How do I know everything's secure? Do I go to each of those 27 teams and go, "How's the network? How's my storage? "How's my compute? How's the app? "Oh, and by the way, it changed at noon today, "are we good?" That's really complicated. >> So the benefit of automation is that it does free up people's time to do other things in their jobs. So do you see that we will see more innovation coming out of these teams when they aren't having to check the network, check the network, and make sure that the patch is working. How do you see this changing the way people do their jobs? >> We see two ends of the spectrum that people automate. They automate some of the traditional stuff they have, which puts drag on them from a resource and a cost point of view. So they can modernize and optimize their old stuff, automate that, now they can focus on their new services, and really focus on the automation of what's going to change their business and help them compete in this world. So by optimizing the old, they can take some of those resources and put it into the new business services. >> Joe, you said Ansible was acquired about 18 months ago, and the announcement you went through looked like it's really weaving into the fabric of a lot of other products. Can you walk us through a little bit about that, about where Ansible's gone and maybe a little bit of vision toward where else it will end up in the portfolio? >> Sure. So we've leveraged it in our management portfolio with the announcements you see today, but we're also leveraging it in the rest of Red Hat's portfolio. If you look at Red Hat OpenStack or OpenShift, our Red Hat virtualization, and in the future, our Red Hat Enterprise Linux, will all have bits and pieces of Ansible technology in, because those things help customers consume that, to install it, configure it, manage it, and automate at a higher level. So we're trying to make the best automated products we can deliver. And then on the management side, whether you're using Red Hat products or you're managing a hybrid environment with other products, which is a lot of the case, then you're going to have a set of tools that's going to be able to automate that even further. So we're being good citizens by providing products that are inherently manageable and automatable when you get them from us and then we're providing tools that allow you to manage these very complex, multi-cloud environments. >> One of the big things we are talking about is the workplace culture, and Jim Whitehurst has done such an incredible job of really creating this open culture at Red Hat. How does it play out on a microscale in terms of how do IT leaders and managers give their employees, their teams time to innovate as well as the opportunity to take risks and to try things? >> Well, it's interesting because open-source has sort of changed over the years from sort of a commodity play where I can get something cheaper because it's the open-source version of something, let's say Linux. Now we've gone to the other end of the spectrum, where a lot of the new innovations, in this case management, is happening in an open-source community. So businesses can go and try that technology without contacting a vendor. They can sample it, they can follow it, they can see the rate of adoption. Everything's done in the open so they can see how transparent things are going. And basically, they can leverage that technology. A lot of them have no choice. If they don't leverage open-source innovations, their competitors will and they're going to be, basically at a disadvantage from a technology stack or management tool, whether it's containers in OpenShift or running in different platforms or storage, they really need to leverage the open-source communities. So we're seeing mandates. Some companies that, years ago, were fearful of open-source are now making investments and coming up with company policies for how to contribute to open-source. And we're seeing a lot more open-source consumption. >> Is that driven out of fear, as you said, if we don't do it our competitors will? Or has there been a real shift in mindset? >> No, I think it's more carrot than stick. I think that they see the innovation, whether it's big data or artificial intelligence, in my area, in automation in management, that that's where a lot of the innovation is going. So if they want the best technology to be able to bring to bear on their business and their IT needs, they're going to look in open-source because that's where it's happening. >> Let's look into the future a little bit, and think about where we will be 5, 10 years from now. What are your predictions? >> Well, I think there's just a huge trend towards automation. You're going to see it, we're seeing it in the consumer life. You're going to see it in business life. So automation across all different areas. And I think as things become more instrumentable and automatable, think about internet of things where you're going to have hundreds of devices in your house, you would like them to talk to each other. You'd like your smoke detector to talk to your camera to talk to your phone to talk to your light switch, etc. Those are examples of automation that people are going to tie these things together to try and make systems of automation. You're seeing it around personal digital assistants, the Alexas and the Siris and the different systems like that. >> Rebecca: Cortanas. >> Self-driving cars, we've gone from not having any of them to there's a bunch of vendors that are all vying for that. I think you're going to see those kind of system-wide automation in a lot of different industries. >> Joe, Red Hat really isn't a services business, it's very much a subscription model, but how much do you have to help companies to fix their processes before they automate because we all know it's like I can't just say, "Oh, let's take my existing process and automate it." Because many times you don't want to automate what's not working well. You want to fix the process a little bit first and then automate it. How does Red Hat get involved or what partners do you use for that? >> That's a great question. So, a number of things. First of all, we have a lot of partners. Red Hat is a trusted advisor. So we can tell customers what's working, especially on the new technologies because we're building a lot of them. When it comes to containers or object storage or different things, we're building them. You know, Ansible, we have a lot of developers working and pushing that, so we're a trusted advisor. We also work with a lot of partners, system integrators, service providers, VARs, people who are steeped in the technology and in the case of the open-source technologies, they can get involved. They're contributing code. They're providing a training. In the case of management, we have SIs now providing automation practices. So if you said, "Gee, I need help automating my old stuff," you could get one of the big SIs to come in who's got, you know, in some cases, they've got a thousand people trained up in Ansible to come in and help you automate your processes, whether they're the old ones or the shiny, new ones you're trying to deploy. >> Joe, thanks so much for joining us. We really appreciate your time. >> Joe: Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman, we'll return with more of theCUBE's coverage of the Red Hat Summit after this. (electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, here in Palo Alto, California. We're part of the ongoing coverage of AnsibleFest 2021, virtual this year like all years. We're covering it virtually. In-person events soon will be back, and we'll be back in person when that happens this year. Year two of virtual coverage of AnsibleFest 2021. And just like last year, a great lineup of virtual interviews. We have the ability to pull people in remotely, which gives us more access to more people. So we've got a lot more content, a lot more content and stories to report. The big theme this year coming up is going to be automation, automation, automation, and hybrid environments. So automation, hybrid, and now the emergence of the democratization of AI. You're seeing AI being driven by automation. You're seeing automation going from repeating tasks that need to be automated to being programmatic in cloud-development life cycle. So a lot of changes going on. We had some great guests. Tom Anderson, Richard Henshall has been there. We had a lot of community updates. Carol Chen was on. Joe Fitzgerald, and Tom Anderson, and Alessandra Perelli were on. Great lineup there. The thought leadership there was all about how Red Hat Ansible are bringing the next generation automation platform to the community and making it easy for new people to come in. We heard from Kentrell, IBM, Scott Kinane, and Anand Gopalakrishnan, and Lisa Chavez. So great, great content there. Again, more and more community. The constant theme of open source and community continues to reign true for Red Hat AnsibleFest 2021. And the big surprise to me was they had great customer attraction, okay? Sapphire Health came on talking about migration. Enterprise customers are taking automation mainstream, powering programmatic, cloud-native solutions. So you're starting to see evidence, not just the hardcore automation folks that Ansible's been servicing in the enterprise and the developer community, but mainstream developers in the enterprises are adopting Ansible. This is the real deal . We heard from the chief architect of Ansible, Matthew Jones, going into great detail on how the enablement of the system is going to be creating more headroom for future growth. All in all, great content from theCUBE. Great guests as usual. And of course, check out Twitter and LinkedIn and all the social networks for CUBE highlights, and of course content and the guests themselves are awesome. So take a listen, and watch those videos, and enjoy the show. (upbeat music playing)

(smooth upbeat music) >> Hello, everybody, John Walls here. Welcome to "theCUBE," in our continuing coverage of Ansible Fest 2021. We now welcome onto "theCUBE," three representatives from Red Hat. Joining us is Ashesh Badani. Who's the Senior Vice President of Products at Red Hat. Ashesh, thank you for joining us today. >> Thanks for having me, John. >> You bet. Also with us Stefanie Chiras, who is the Senior Vice President of the Platforms Business Group also at Red Hat. And Stefanie, how are you doing? >> Good, thanks, it's great to be here with you, John. >> Excellent, thanks for joining us. And last, but certainly not least, Joe Fitzgerald, who is the Vice President and General Manager of the Ansible Business Unit at Red Hat. Joe, good to see you today, thanks for being with us. >> Good to see you again John, thanks for having us. >> It's like, like the big three at Red Hat. I'm looking forward to this. Stefanie, let's just jump in with you and let's talk about what's going on in terms of automation in the hybrid cloud environment these days. A lot of people making that push, making their way in that direction. Everybody trying to drive more value out of the hybrid cloud environment. How is automation making that happen? How's it making it work? >> We have been focused at Red Hat for a number of years now on the value of open hybrid cloud. We really believe in the value of being able to give your applications flexibility, to use the best technology, where you want it, how you need it, and pulling all of that together. But core to that value proposition is making sure that it is consistent, it is secure and it is able to scale. And that's really where automation has become a core space. So as we continue to work our portfolio and our ecosystems and our partnerships to make sure that that open hybrid cloud has accessibility to everything that's new and relevant in this changing market we're in, the automation space that Ansible drives is really about making sure that it can be done in a way that is predictable. And that is really essential as you start to move your workloads around and start to leverage the diversity that an open hybrid cloud can deliver. >> When you're bringing this to a client, and Joe, perhaps you can weigh in on this as well. I would assume that as you're talking about automation, there's probably a lot of, successful head-nodding this way, but also some kind of this way too. There's a little bit of fear, right? And maybe just, they have these legacy systems, there's maybe a little distrust, I don't want to give away control, all these things. So how do you all answer those kinds of concerns when you're talking to the client about this great value that you can drive, but you got to get them there, right? You have to bring them along a bit. >> It's a great question, John, and look, everybody wants to get the hybrid cloud, as Stefanie mentioned. That journey is a little complicated. And if you had silos and challenges before you went to a hybrid cloud, you're going to have more when you got there. We work with a lot of customers, and what we see is this sort of shift from, I would call it low-level task automation to much more of a strategic focus on automation, but there's also the psychology of automation. One of the analysts recently did some research on that. And imagine just getting in your car and letting the car drive you down the street to work. People are still not quite comfortable with that level of automation, they sort of want to be able to trust, but verify, and maybe have their hands near the wheel. You couldn't take the wheel away from them. We see the same thing with automation. They need automation and a lot automation, or they need to be able to verify what it is doing, what they do, what it's going to do. And once they build that confidence, then they tend to do it at scale. And we're working with a lot of customers in that area. >> Joe, you're talking about a self-driving car, that'll never work, right? (laughs) You us bring an interesting point though. Again, I get that kind of surrendering control a little bit and Ashesh, I would assume in the product development world, that's very much your focus, right? You're looking for products that people, not only can use, but they're also comfortable with. That they can accept and they can integrate, and there's buy-in, not only on the engineering level, but also on the executive level. So maybe walk us through that product development, staging or phases, however you want to put it, that you go through in terms of developing products that you think people, not only need, but they'll also accept. >> I think that's absolutely right. You know, I think both Stefanie and Joe, led us off here. I talked about hybrid cloud and Joe, started talking about moving automation forward and getting people comfortable. I think a lot of this is, meeting customers where they are and then helping them get on the journey, right? So we're seeing that today, right? So traditional configuration management on premise, but at the same time, starting to think about, how do we take them out into the cloud, bringing greater automation to bear there. But so that's true for us across our existing customer base, as well as the new customers that we see out there. So doing that in a way that Joe talked about, right? Ensuring the trust, but verify is in play, is critical. And then there's another area which I'm sure we'll talk a little bit more about, right? Is ensuring that security implications are taken into account as we go through it. >> Well, let's just jump into security, that's one of the many considerations these days. About ensuring that you have the secure operation, you're doing some very complex tasks here, right? And you're blending multi-vendor environments and multi-domain environments. I mean you've got a lot, you're juggling a lot. So I guess to that extent, how much of a consideration is security and those multiple factors today, for you. And again, I don't know which one of the three of you might want to jump on this, but I would assume, this is a high priority, if not the highest priority, because of the headlines that security and those challenges are garnering these days. >> Well, there's the general security question and answer, right? So this is the whole, shift-left DevSecOps, sort of security concerns, but I think specific to this audience, perhaps I can turn over to Joe to talk a little bit about how Ansible has been playing in the security domain. >> Now, it's a great way to start, Ashesh. People are trying to shift left, which means move, sort of security earlier on in the process where people are thinking about it and development process, right? So we've worked with a lot of customers who were trying to do DevSecOps, right? And to provide security, automation capabilities during application build and deployment. Then on the operational side, you have this ongoing issue of some vulnerability gets identified, how fast can I secure my environment, right? There's a whole new area of security, orchestration, automation, or remediation that's involved, and the challenge people have is just like with networking or other areas, they've got dozens in some cases, hundreds of different systems across their enterprise that they have to integrate with, in order to be able to close a vulnerability, whether it's deploying a patch or closing a port, or changing firewall configuration, this is really complicated and they're being measured by, okay, there's this vulnerability, how fast can we get secure? And that comes down to automation, it has to. >> Now, Joe, you mentioned customers, if you would maybe elaborate a little bit about the customers that we've been hearing from on the stage, the virtual stage, if you will, at Ansible Fest this year and maybe summarize for our audience, what you're hearing from those customers, and some of those stories when we're talking about the actual use of the platform. >> Yeah, so Ansible Fest is our annual, automation event, right? For Ansible users. And I think it's really important to hear from the customers. We're vendors, we can tell you anything you want and try and get you to believe it. Customers they're actually doing stuff, right? And so, at Ansible Fest, we've got a great mix of customers that are really pushing the envelope. I'll give you one example, JP Morgan Chase. They're talking about how in their environment with focus over the past couple of years, they've now gotten to a level of maturity with automation, where they have over 50,000 people that are using Ansible automation. They've got a community of practice where they've got people in over twenty-two countries, right? That are sharing over 10,000 playbooks, right? I mean, they've taken automation strategically and embraced it and scaled it out at a level that most other organizations are envious of, right? Another one, and I'm not going to go through the list, but another one I'll mention is Discover, which sort of stepped back and looked at automation strategically and said, we need to elevate this to a strategic area for the company. And they started looking at across all different areas, not just IT automation, business process automation, on their other practices internally. And they're doing a presentation on how to basically analyze where you are today and how to take your automation initiatives forward in a strategic way. Those are usually important to other organizations that maybe aren't as far along or aren't on a scale of that motivation. >> Yeah, so Stefanie, I see you nodding your head and you're talking about, when Joe was just talking about assessment, right? You have to kind of see where are we, how mature are we on our journey right now? So maybe if you could elaborate on that a little bit, and some of the key considerations that you're seeing from businesses, from clients and potential clients, in terms of the kind of thought process they're going through on their journey, on their evolution. >> I think there's a lot of sort of values that customers are looking for when they're on their automation journey. I think efficiency is clearly one. I think one that ties back to the security discussion that we talked about. And I use the term consistency, but it's really about predictability. And I think I have a lot of conversations with customers that if they know that it's consistently deployed, particularly as we move out and are working with customers at the edge, how do they know that it's done the same way every time and that it's predictable? There's a ton of security and confidence built into that. And I think coming back to Joe's point, it is a journey providing transparency and visibility is step one, then taking action on that is then step two. And I think as we look at the customers who are on this automation journey, it's them understanding what's the value they're looking for? Are they looking for consistency in the deployments? Are they looking for efficiency across their deployments? Are they looking for ways to quickly migrate between areas in the open hybrid cloud? What is the value they're looking for? And then they look at how do they start to build in confidence in how they deliver that. And I think it starts with transparency. The next step is starting to move into taking action, and this is a space where Joe and the whole team, along with the community have really focused on pulling together things like collections, right? Playbooks that folks can count on and deploy. We've looked within the portfolio, we're leveraging the capabilities of this type of automation into our products itself with Red Hat enterprise Linux, we've introduced systems roles. And we're seeing a lot of by pulling in that Ansible capability directly into the product, it provides consistency of how it gets deployed and that delivers a ton of confidence to customers. >> So, Ashesh I mean, Stefanie was talking about, the customers and obviously developing, I guess, cultural acceptance and political acceptance, within the ranks there. Where are we headed here, past what know now in terms of the traditional applications and traditional automations and whatever. Kind of where is this going, if you would give me your crystal ball a bit about automation and what's going to happen here in the next 12-18 months. >> So what I'm going to do, John, is try to marry two ideas. So we talked about hybrid cloud, right? Stefanie started talking about joining a hybrid cloud. I'm going to marry automation with containers, right? On this journey of hybrid cloud, right? And give you two examples, both some successful progress we've been making on that front, right? Number one, especially for the group here, right? Check out the Ansible collection for Kubernetes, it's been updated for Python Three, of course, with the end-of-life for Python Two, but more important, right? It's the focus on improving performance for large automation tasks, right? Huge area where Ansible shines, then taking advantage of turbo mode, where instead of the default being a single connection to a Culebra API, for every request that's out there with turbo mode turned on, the API connection gets reused significantly and obviously improving performance. Huge other set of enhancements as well, right? So I think that's an interesting area for the Ansible community to leverage and obviously to grow. And the second one that I wanted to call out was just kind of the, again, back to this sort of your notion of the marriage of automation with containers, right? Is the work that's going on, on the front of the integration, the tight integration between Ansible as well as Red Hat's, advanced cluster management, right? Which is helping to manage Kubernetes clusters at scale. So now Red Hat's ACM technology can help our monthly trigger Ansible playbooks, upon key lifecycle actions that have happened. And so taking advantage of technologies like operators, again, core Kubernetes construct for the hybrid cloud environment. This integration between advanced cluster management and Ansible, allows for much more efficient execution of tasks, right? So I think that's really powerful. So wrapping that up, right? This world of hybrid cloud really can be brought together by just a tighter integration between working Ansible as well as the work that's going on on the container plant. >> Great, well, thank you. Ashesh, Stefanie, Joe, thank you all for sharing the time here. Part of our Ansible Fest coverage here, enjoy the conversation and continuous success at Red Hat. Thank you for the time today. >> Thank you so much John. >> Thank you. >> You bet. I'm joined here by three executives at Red Hat, talking about our Ansible Fest 2021 coverage. I'm John Walls, and you're watching "theCUBE." (bright music)

>> From around the globe, it's theCube with digital coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, and this is the cubes coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020. Of course, this year's event happening digitally, we're talking to Red Hat executives, partners, customers, where they are around the globe, bringing them remotely into this digital event. And really important topic, of course, has been Automation for a long time, I think back to my career automation is something we've been talking about for decades, but even more important in today's age. Happy to welcome back to the program, Tim Kramer with Red Hat, Vice President of Engineering is that I don't have listed view here. But since we last talked to him at Ansible Fest, has been a little expansion in the scope of what you're working on. First of all, welcome back, and tell us what's new in your world? >> All right, thanks a lot. Yeah, there's been rather substantial change in roles. I'm now in charge actually, of all of the engineering within Red Hat. All the development engineering site includes: the middleware teams, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, of course management and automation, the new team that we just brought over from IBM doing Advanced Container Management. I'm basically running the whole thing and OpenShift of course. >> Excellent. Just a few things to keep you busy. Congratulations on that and love your support in the the Boston "Hello World" rella eight shirt that of course we saw last year at summit. I know one of the things being digital is people do miss some of the t-shirts. I know my family was quite fond of the "May The Fourth Be With You" shirts, that Red Hat did one year at summit. Of course, celebrating Star Wars Day, highly celebrated in in the Miniman household. But Tim, let's talk about Ansible. This brings our audience up to speed, what's happening that some of the latest pieces, and of course, it's been one of the great success stories. Ansible was a lot of adoption before the acquisition, but really accelerated over the last few years? >> At Ansible Fest, we talked a lot about technology to come and showed a few demos of the possibilities. What we have done since then is actually bring all of that technology to life and to expand it. One thing that Red Hat has really done is continue to invest heavily in Ansible, to make sure that we can bring new capabilities and new value to the subscription for everyone. Some of the things that have been happening since summit, which of course we are in, and since Ansible Fest, since we last talked was it, the community continues to scale at a really rapid rate. It's almost hard to keep up. And the number of modules that we have had is grown just tremendously. We have well over 3000 modules now that are available, and as customers and partners and also just casual users are looking through that, it's difficult to figure out: what's really supported? What's really rock solid? What can I count on? And what is, maybe sort of that Wild West community, I'm just trying out some stuff with Ansible and see how it goes. We've been focusing on a lot, is a place that you can come to the Ansible automation platform and the hub where you can now get this content and you can rely on the fact that it's going to be certified by partners, tested by partners, they're always keeping up with the latest updates. A great example of this is, let's just take NetApp or F5, or Cisco as good examples, across the various spaces, we absolutely in the Ansible engineering team are not experts on all of the latest changes, the new hardware coming out, the new software upgrades that they're making. And our ability to keep up with that is pretty difficult. We just can't do it, but they sure can. And their customers, and our customers are both demanding that we give them more content, better content, and we need to be able to do it at the rate that our partners want to be able to provide that kind. As an example, normally we were kind of slowing Ansible down and trying to do one release every six months. But if a new piece of software, a new switch or a new disk array or anything comes out in the meantime, all of our customers had to wait for that next six months release, that was not very convenient. And having an expectation that our partners are going to line up on our schedule is, well, That didn't work out so well for them. We've created the certified content. And we now have the goals to have 50 certified partners. Back at first, I think we had three or four. We're now up to 30, our goal is to hit 50. We had about 100 modules that we showed at fest that were certified, we now have over 1200 modules that are certified content. And these are our partners, creating this content and making it stable and secure for everyone to use. >>So that, I think, by far   >> That was the coolest thing that we've done. >> Yeah, it's great to see that progress. Congratulations on the momentum since Ansible Fest. One of the other things talked about that back at that show, we talked about how analytics and automation, how those are going together, how's adoption been? Is this impossibly met? >> Adoption on the analytic side has been... It's been taking off. It was pretty nascent. I can tell you that, that we've grown by about five X there, but we started a little bit small. We had a few customers that signed up early on to do it. I think probably the more impressive thing is that, we have a couple of customers in markets that you would traditionally think, we're not going to get their data, they're more concerned about what we're sharing, but we have a major bank, we have a major manufacturer that have well over 10,000 systems providing data back into Red Hat that allows us then to analyze and provide a bunch of analytics back on their running estate. And I think that's amazing, seeing the big customers that are coming in from Marcus that you might think, we're probably not going to get a lot of uptake has been really exciting to me. >> All right, you talked a bit about how Ansible fits into the ecosystem, of course being at summit, want to understand a bit more how Ansible the latest of how it's fitting into the rest of the Red Hat portfolio. I've got interviews with Stephanie Shiraz, talking about you, Raul and Joe Fitzgerald, talking about ACM, your group I know is heavily involved working on a lot of those pieces. Help us understand how this is kind of a seamless portfolio. >> I think that's one of the most important things that we do within Red Hat team, is that we have to share the sufficiency across all the product groups and make them better and provide an additional enhanced value there. We've done a lot on the RHEL side, probably one of the maybe lesser known thing is that, we've been working really closely on OpenShift. And actually, we have a lot of customers now that really want the Ansible automation hub available on OpenShift as a first-class application. We're doing things, we're writing operators for those so that we can automate the updates and upgrades and back up and all of that important functionality, so that it's really easy, than to manage your Ansible automation hub, running on OpenShift, that's one big thing. And then we're going to integrate that really well into the advanced container management, that the team from IBM that came over is working towards. I have a really close partnership with ACM team to make sure that we can start to not only gather lists of affected systems, but then take that list and do a bunch of automations against it. >> That's one. On the RHEL side, we've done a lot. We introduced at last summit rally, and we talked about having insights as part of that. Since then, we've been adding more and more capabilities into insights, and to enhance that value of the subscription route. We looked at adding in, well, advisor is now what we used to call insights. It's just something that advises you about problems or issues that may be occurring in your URL instances that are running on prem. We've also added in a drift service, so you can tell if your configurations are sort of drifting apart. We've added in a compliance checker, so you can define some kind of a policy or compliance that you want to enforce on all of your running instances, and we make sure that you're still compliant. We also have a vulnerability detector, which you'd kind of expect, so any nasty security issues that come along, we can pop those up and show you right away. And probably some of the... One of the newer things is, we allow you to do patching. And you can do that patching, right from cloud@redhat.com. We also have another new very exciting feature, which is Subscription Watch, also on cloud@redhat.com. And what this allows you to do is to see and manage all of your subscriptions across your entire hybrid estate. From what you're running on prem, to what you're running in any of the public clouds, we can actually track that for you. You can see what kind of usage you have. And then, make better economic decisions for yourself, and then be able to easily expand that usage if you want to, it used to be a little bit more difficult to do that. We're trying to make subscriptions just like as much in the background as possible to make it easier for our customers. >> Tim, one of one of the big changes customers have to go through is moving from, their environment in their data centers, to the leverage of SaaS and managing things that are outside of their control and the public cloud. You've got an engineering development team, and you've got software that went from, mostly going in customers data centers too, you've got SaaS offerings, you're living in the public cloud. Want to understand, what's changing in your world? What advice would you give to other people as to kind of the learnings that Red Hat has had going through those pieces? >> It's actually a kind of a neat story, because after we change to start making a lot of our services that we had just only shipping products on prem into cloud based services, we had to develop this platform to be able to host all of these services. We started with the insights platform, because we already had that running out in the public cloud. So that was the obvious first thing to base everything on. But we had to build out that platform so that it could support all these services, the ones I just talked about, that are with REL are really good examples. Between a policy, compliance drift, all of these different kinds of services that we're offering, we had to build out that set of capabilities and services in what we're calling sort of the cloud@redhat.com platform. What I'm seeing is that a lot of customers are going through some of these same kinds of thoughts. Like they have a myriad, let's say of applications that are running that they're trying to provide back into their their own company. Different divisions of a company, they have things that are running in the cloud, some things that are running on prem, and they want to start to be able to offer a more cohesive set of services, consolidate some of these, share some of the engineering effort that they have across their various teams. This is exactly the journey that we went through to get to cloud@redhat.com. Finding a surprising number of customers that are actually really interested just in that story, about how we did that. One of the things that we've found is, we've been working with the folks at the open innovation labs within Red Hat. And this is one of the transformation stories that they see constantly as well. We've worked with them and shared this, they're a great resource to help customers kind of think through that problem and get them into a new kind of a platform. But it's quite a journey. We've been really focused on the infrastructure and on prem. Moving to the cloud was a big. But I'll tell you it engineering can move so much faster in a SaaS service than it can with on prem software delivery. It's been remarkable how quickly we could get there. >> Tim, one other thing, if I look at Red Hat, you're a global company, most development organizations are highly distributed to begin with. So many companies today are now having to rapidly figure out how do I manage people that are working from home? How do I live in these environments? From an automation tooling, we'd love to hear any advice you have there, as well as just anything else from your engineering experience in your teams that other people might be able to learn from, as they're dealing with today's landscape. >> To be honest, this is a... We have never seen anything like this in our history, with this kind of pandemic that's happening worldwide. It's shifting everything about business. And it has been challenging just within Red Hat engineering for how we can manage the engineers and their expectations and how difficult it can be to work from home. I have amazing stories from my own engineers. I had an engineer who's in Spain and his wife is a nurse. She's on like 18-hour shifts, the hospital comes back, they have to separate, he's got the kids. And because they don't want them to get infected, it's a really, really difficult working situation for a lot of families out there to try to make it through this. One of the things at Red Hat is, we just have to recognize that it's okay to slow things down a little bit. Let our engineers not feel the pressure that they have to do both childcare and school-at-home and caring for sick relatives or sick family, as well as meet all of your deadlines, it's kind of too much. We've been really... We're trying to be very compassionate with our folks letting them know that we have their back, and it's going to be okay as we try to get ourselves through this ridiculously different time that we've never seen anything like this, like I said. From an engineering perspective, I think work-from-home has been, it's okay for some people. If you have a larger home, I think it's a little easier maybe to find a room that you can go into and do your work. For some, no, if they're in an apartment, or you're sharing with a bunch of friends, it's not your workplace. And it can be really challenging to figure out how to work for eight hours a day with sort of a lot of distractions or just feeling confined and it's just been really difficult for anybody that wants to try to get out, you go a little stir-crazy. The good thing I guess is that engineering is naturally lends itself to being able to be remote and work from home. We have an advantage that way, than other industries, which is great. But it's definitely been really challenging for our teams to be able to cope with this and all we can do is just be really understanding. >> Tim, we appreciate the stories, they're definitely everyone's working through some challenging times. Want to give you the final word as to really takeaways as to what should people be watching? What things should people be going back and looking at from an automation standpoint as they leave Red Hat Summit 2020? >> We're just going to continue to work with the community, work with our partners, get more certified content and continue to scale, the best way that we can for all of our users and our customers. That is the key focus. We want to continue automating and providing all of that flexibility. If you want all 4000 modules and a big download, we certainly are... We're going to continue to give you that option. But if you want to be able to start customizing what you download, maybe only relying on certified content, instead of community content, we're going to give you that option now as well, so that you know what you're running. And with the analytics, we're just scratching the surface here. We're getting some great data. It's helping us to develop new ways of insights into how your systems are running. And that'll get very exciting as we go forward. I know that we've seen like a Forex increase already in the amount of insights attached to REL, which is really great, and for now, at least in the hundreds of customers that are using the AI, I think as we show more value there, you'll get a lot more customers to provide some of their data which will allow us then collectively to come up with some really great analytics to help people become more efficient with your automation. >> Well, Tim Kramer, thank you so much for the updates. And thank you to everything your team's doing. And just a reminder to the audience, of course, these communities not only are important technical resources, but many of them you've made friends with over the years. If you need help, reach out to the community. There are so many good stories that can be found amongst these communities helping each other through these challenging times. Much more coverage from Red Hat Summit 2020. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you as always for watching theCube. 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>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Red Hat. Summit 2020 Brought to you by Red Hat. >>Hi, I'm Stew Minimum And and this is the Cube's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020 course Digital event This year. We're not together at Mosconi, but we are bringing together many of the speakers thought leaders, customers in this very important ecosystem. Really excited to welcome back to our program. Stephanie Cheers. Who's the vice president and general manager of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux business unit inside of Red Hat. Stephanie. So great to see you have to give you a virtual hug high five year, but you know, always great to see and have you on the program. >>Oh, thank you. So it's great to be here, and this is what together means today. But it's great to be together with you >>again. Here it's limit. >>Yeah, the discussion is you talk on it together apart for for a time we talk in tact. That change is one of the only constants that we have, and there are more changes than ever happening right now. So before we get into kind of your B you talk a little bit about, You know, some of the big changes. There's organizational changes, you know, I know we spoke to you about in 2019 at IBM Think and Red Hat Summit because you've worked for both sides of the equation here, Uh, give us kind of the latest from your standpoint. >>Yes, certainly the leadership changes which have been public now for a couple weeks. Those were a big change >>for for us. I think one of the things that has come through is IBM has really been respecting what red hat is. What? Um, what we do. But also how we do it is very important and valued. And we at red Hat >>believe in it so strongly. We're sticking to what Red Hat does best. Everything is open source. Everything is collaborative. And honestly, I have to say it. It >>feels great as a red Hatter to see Jim in the position he's in at IBM Um, Paul's passion, >>which clearly comes across in his keynotes and >>his passion for how we do have an open source development model. It's great to have them now take over the CEO role for Red hat. So it's it's really exciting times. I think. Last year when we spoke, it was, um it was a bit of a wait and see and see what happens. And I think now the recent announcements really solidify this sort of synergy and partnership that IBM and Red Hat have and what our intentions are in the market. But at Red Hat, we still stay red hat, and we're still driving things the way we always have. And that's great. Feels that >>that that's great. And thank you so much for the update. So when we talk about your business unit that the Red Hat Enterprise, Linux, of course, Rehl, um, you know, I've got a little too much history, you know. I go back when it was, whereas, you know, before well and kind of wash the growth of Linux sto become really, you know, the underlying fabric of so much of what we see out there today for all of businesses, so many companies could not exist if it wasn't for Linux. And in the seven years we've been having the Cube, of course, we've really watched that that moved from Lennox to not only be some of the foundations of what's happening in customer's environments, but also a major piece of cloud and cloud. Native S O. You know, give us that up date as to, you know, here in 2020. You know why? You know Linux has been around for quite a long time, but, you know, it's still is relevant. >>Yeah, so that's it. That's a >>great leader and ties exactly to how we look at well in the red hat sort of entire portfolio. Um, when you look at Lenox of how it evolved, it started out as being a bit of a cheaper alternative to units. But it quickly became, because of the open source way and collaborative way it's developed. It quickly became sort of this springboard for innovation because you have all these incredible innovators collaborating upstream. All of that has fed to a whole different view of what Linux is. Is cloud exists because of Linux is containers are just a different deployment mechanism or Lennox workloads, artificial intelligence. All those APS are built on Linux, so it's become this standardized foundation upon which innovation is done today, And for me, that's the most exciting thing, because it red hat and rail. Our goal is to one. Have it just work right? It has >>to be the standard. And, um well, sometimes that can be misinterpreted. It >>is boring or a commodity. It is anything but a commodity. It's probably one of the most strategic decisions that someone makes. Is which Raoul Distribution? Which Red Hat, which Lennox distribution did they use and that really take real pride that it's built for the enterprise? It's build for security. It's built for resiliency, and all of that build it once deploy anywhere, translates into also using all the innovation, all the container ization capabilities, using it across multiple public clouds. So it's really that combination of having it just work, be the foundation of where you build once and then being able to leverage all the innovation that's coming out of the open source world today. >>Yeah, really interesting points. Stephanie, I think back to when we talked for years about the consumer nation consumers, consumer ization. Excuse me of I t and people thought that therefore, there wouldn't be differentiation, you know, just by white box things and everything will be off the shelf. But if you look at how most companies build things, they really hyper optimize that. I need to build what I need. I need to use the tools that are available, and I need to be able to be agile. You know, I want one of my highlights last year talking to a lot of companies going through their digital transformation and a number of them at Red Hat Summit last year where they talked about both the organization and technology changes that they're making to move faster. And, of course, your portfolio is a big piece of helping them move forward. >>And that's one thing we're seeing that that ability to consume, innovation and get the >>most and extract the most out of what they're running today in their data center. As customers transform and take on this digital transformation, it's not just a technology statement. In most cases, it's an organizational statement as well. And how do you bridge both those and move it forward? It's one thing we focus a lot on right with the open innovation labs, with a lot of customers as well, because it's not just about the technology, it's about the way we work in the way we do things as well. >>Yeah. So, Stephanie, you know, every every year or so I hear it's like, Oh, well, we've got a new way to To the operating system. There was the Jeff just enough operating system for for a while when container ization came out, there was little company named core Os. That was like, Oh, we're going to make a thin version or core OS is now Ah, piece of red hat. Um, so still, with the cloud, there's always, you know, we're going to change the way the operating system it's done. Um, we just love your viewpoint as to, you know, Red Hat has, you know, a few options and kind of a spectrum of offerings. But how do your customers think about the OS these days? And you know, how should we be thinking about rail specifically in that overall spectrum? >>No, it's so that's a great question, too. And we look at >>it as Lennox and Rehl is be one thing that stays the same and helps you get the value out of all the work you've already put in all the development work you've already put in. And make sure that that translates to the future, where everything is changing, how you deploy where you deploy what you deploy. All of that may change, but if you want to get the value out of the work in the development that has been done yesterday, you need something to stay the same. In our view, that's real. We build it with um in mind for the enterprise along lifecycle security support. We build all of that into it so that when you build on a rail monorail kernel, you can take that. If you want to deploy it in a container, you can deploy on Rehl itself. Or if you need orchestration, you can deploy it on open shift. And that's part of the reason why you mentioned Core OS. So we now have a rail core. OS is within open shift 4.0, on beyond, of course. But what we did was we tailor down what is. In reality, it's the same packages. It's the same certification, security, all of that work that we put in. We take the core OS piece of it, what's essential and really optimized for open shift. We build that into an immutable image, and it goes out as part of open shift. It's not available separately because it's really tailored. What we pick the life cycle is all matching open shift, >>and what that does >>is provide you on open shift experience. That's easy to update fully across the board, all the way down to the kernel. But you know, it's the same Lennox that you have in rail, >>and it's that consistency >>of technology that we really strive for. Um, same thing in public Cloud. So when you build an image on Prem on REL, you can take that image up into the public cloud. And no, it's the same level of security and it just will work, you know, part of part of my team. And we take a lot of pride in the fact that it will just work on. And while that >>may not sound super exciting, particularly in days >>like like right now, being dependable and being reliable and knowing that it's secure, all of that is really important when you run your business that those those features or anything but commoditized >>Well, yeah, I think one of the real volumes that customers see with real specifically is there's so much change going on there, and you look at the Linux community, you look at what open shifts doing in the Kubernetes community. There's so much coaches going on red hat packages that make sure that you don't need to think about the almost chaos that's going out there in all of those communities. But you packaged those together. So Stephanie rarely was, of course, one of the highlights of last year's Red Hat Summit. So we'd love to hear you know, if you've got any good customer stories, really, the momentum of relate as you've seen it, you roll out around the world as and then we'll talk about the new updates. You have this. >>Yeah, great. So Rehl eight was a big deal for us last year, as you remember, and partly because not >>only all the features and functions, of course, which we put into it, but also because we really wanted to reposition what the value of an operating system is within a data center and within their innovation future. So we really focus all the features and functions into two buckets. One is about how do we help you with the operating system? Run your business better, more efficiently If the most out of the systems you have in the critical workloads that you run today and how do we use the operating system to help you bridge into the next level of innovation? What's coming down the pipeline? Things like containers. >>And we really wanted to >>make sure that, as we see you know, most customers are looking to how they digitally transform. But of course, no one has the freedom to throw away everything they've done in the past. They want to build upon that and get value out of it. So we really focused on balancing those two things now, as we look at. In fact, one of the commitments we made because we heard it from customers was they wanted a more predictable deployment of our minor releases and our major releases. And we committed, um, at the REHL eight launch that we would be delivery minor releases every six months, major releases every three years, and we have held to that. We delivered 816 months after we delivered eight. And now you saw last week we delivered eight dot too. Um, this is what it means for us to stand by our world and be dependable as an operating system. And the beauty of the subscription with well is that if you're a customer and you're running REL seven, particularly in times right now, it's It's not that easy to get into your data center, perhaps. And so if you don't choose to update to eight now, you can stay on seven until that time works. That's to me. That's part of the beauty and the flexibility of the subscription model. We have course want to continue to bring your new capabilities and new features. But the subscription Our goal is to have a value subscription that you can you can get the most value from No matter when you decide to upgrade or no forward with, uh, with a different releases, we have >>Well, you can go. And congratulations on keeping the releases going on schedule. One of the nice things about open source is we can see the roadmap out there. You've made this Ah, this promise and you're keeping to it. So ah is you said the announcements we made has been talked about in the keynote. So give us a couple of highlights. Says what people to be looking at and looking to learn more when they dig into a thought to >>Yeah, great. So we really wanted to stick with a few key >>messages with it, and they do really tie to How do we help you run your business? And how do we help you grow your business? It's one thing that we announced and what we pivoted to, um, with the eight dot io is we >>really moved to? How do we How do we >>deliver what we called an intelligent OS, which means an OS that helps you bridge the gap and brings more value to you in your data center than you got before? One of the key aspects to this was adding in the capability of red hat insights, and we added insights capability into every single rail subscription that is under current support. So whether or not you moved to relate whether you have real seven, if you have a supported version of real six, all of those had insights added to it, and what insights is is a as a service on cloud at red hat dot com and link up your servers, and >>it will give you insight >>into operational capability. Is it configured correctly is it could be optimized for better performance. Where are you on your C V E updates and what it does is take all that knowledge that Red Hat has from all the support cases and things that we're seeing what's happening in the industry, what we're seeing other customers have, and we can even proactively help customers. The feedback on this capability has been huge. In fact, you'll see in the announcement last week we've added a lot of new capabilities into this specifically For that reason we've had customers, you know, it's like having it's like having more ops people on my team because I'm getting this input in directly from Red Hat for things to look at. And so that, to me, was probably one of the key aspects that, as we look from going to eight into eight dot too, how do we build up that capability? And of course, last week you saw we added a lot to that, and I think now more than ever, we want to make sure that everyone who has a real subscription is getting the most value out of that and I think insights is one of the places where if you have a subscription and, um, you can value or you can get more value from operational help, insights is a place where we want to help you. Um, we everything we had prior we have now bucket sized into a capability and insights called advisor is really about performance, stability and security and doing an analysis for you. We've added a new capabilities around vulnerability, Right. How do you re mediate common vulnerabilities and exposures, compliance aspect, patch aspect policies and drift? Um, kind of all of those we've now bucket it in into that insights capability. So this friends a lot more value to something that we have already seen. Customers say, You know, we didn't expect to get this amount of input and continuous growth because we constantly add new new rules into that engine. And so you know what? What we what we knew yesterday will be what we know tomorrow, and we look forward to sharing with that with everyone >>who has a subscription. So this is >>a place where I think it's ah, it's an important place for folks to look, particularly now because operational efficiency is really key. And security is really we have a lot of capabilities in both. What? Yes, Please, >>please, please, go ahead. Now, >>one other aspect on that that I wanted to mention >>was we also added a capability called subscription watch and subscription Watch helps you get a very simple, clean view of all the subscriptions you have and where they're running. And that was one thing that we saw. Customers say there was friction. And how do I know where my entitlements are? How I'm using them across my entire enterprise Corruption watch can help with that. So, um, this sort of cloud dot red hat dot com capability that we can assist with and is already part of your subscription. These are the kinds of things that we really want to help augment this to make Really intelligent os for the enterprise. >>Yeah. Stuff Stephanie. The comment I was gonna make is there's certain shows that I go to that every year. You go to it, You say Okay, it's a little bit bigger. They announce something. They made some progress on it. What has impressed me most about going to the red Hat show year after year is really the the growth of the of the portfolio, if you will. So when I first started going to it, it was, you know, a lot of the people there were, you know, the hard core Linux people. Um And then, you know, there's some storage people, some networking people is cloud containers really grew. It really blossomed into this really robust ecosystem. Oh, and growth there. So would love just to get your viewpoint on, you know, the skill set because, you know, I'm sure there's plenty of companies out there that are like, Well, you know, I've got some people that are, you know, my limits people, and they do things that aren't there. But, you know, how do you see kind of the skill set and what what Red Hat's doing really permeating more and more of, of companies, day to day activity. >>I think one of the things that I'm >>most proud of is even since last year's all the deeper collaborations we have between the various product lines. Certainly we'll talk with Joe Fitzgerald, and he and I work together very closely. Capabilities like insights. How do we add answerable capabilities directly into real. And what that does is really help. I think in any customer today, skills is probably one of the biggest concerns that they have. How do they grow those skills? How do they help folks grow and learn more and progress into the innovation areas? But clearly they still need their their mission critical applications to run and how do they span that? And I think what we're really trying to do is be able to bring the strength of the portfolio together to help a customer have more flexibility in how they leverage their skills and how they grow their skills. >>Because I think coming back to >>that statement that that you made earlier it's not just about technology. It's about how, if >>you really want to be, have agile, it's about >>how a company has organized. And I think we're hoping that we bring together the strength of the portfolio so that a customer is able todo leverage their organization and leverage their skills and the best way possible. I think another place where we worked hard on eight dot too. Some similar lines of bridging the portfolio was, you know, we announced back in eight dot io. We were putting container ization tools directly in Terrell with build a pod made in scope e 08 dot too. We brought in the newest versions of Scope EO and Build Up. In fact, in tech preview, you get containerized versions of those, and so we're continuing to add. What we are seeing is the container ization is a journey for customers. Many customers just want to deploy a single container on a server. Or they were. They want to deploy a single container in a VM Um, they're not ready for orchestration. We wanted to put the tools in so that a customer could do that on REHL. Get started, get those containers deployed on REHL. Put those tools directly, and we added it to old protocol, which is a tool built for security. It brings that security of SC Lennox and brings that up and adds value at the container level. It's those kinds of things as you see the bridge from well into open shift. How do we help a customer rich? That skill journey as well along that path and I think right now in kubernetes and Containers skills is a is a big, big area of focus, so the more we can help ease that across the portfolio and bring those things together is really important. And I know we're working very closely with the chefs in the, um and the team there in order to help bridge that. >>Excellent. Stephanie, I just want to give you the last word. We talked a lot about the ongoing journey that customers are going through. So give us your final take away as to how customers should be thinking about red hat in general and role specifically as their journey goes forward. >>I think I think one of the things >>we're very proud of here at Red Hat is that we always, particularly in the open source communities with our customers, with our partners, we want to roll up our sleeves and help, and that's we want. So, developer, we wanna work upstream with you. It's one of the things we're very proud of, and now, particularly in this time it's We want to make sure that folks understand we're here to help, and we want to make sure that you're getting the most out of the subscriptions you have, Um, and we help. We help you on that journey both to get the most out of you can out of your data center today. But also be ready for the innovation that you want to consume going forward. And we're collectively working across red Hat in order to make that happen. But it's, um >>even though this is different and it's there the virtual Experience edition of Red Hat Summit. It's >>great to be together and be able to share the whole message. >>Well, Stephanie, the open source community is definitely used to collaborating remotely. So thank you so much for joining us. It's a pleasure to see you. And we would hope to talk again soon. >>Great to see you too. Thank you for the time. >>Alright. You're watching the Cube's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020 digitally with remote guests from around the globe. Instrument a man and thank you for watching the Cube. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah.