(upbeat music) >> Welcome to AnsibleFest, 2021, the virtual version. This is The Cube and my name is Dave Volante. We're going to dig into automation and its continuing evolution. Tom Anderson is here. He's the vice president of Red Hat Ansible, the automation platform. And Richard Henshall is also here, Senior Manager of Ansible Product Management, of course, at Red Hat. Guys, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you for having us Dave. You're welcome, so Rich with this latest release of the Ansible Automation Platform, AAP, we'll get the acronyms out of the way. The focus seems to be an expanding the reach of automation and its potential use cases. I mean, I'll say automation everywhere, not to be confused with the RPA vendor, but the point is, you're trying to make it easier to automate things like provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, throw in orchestration and all these other IT processes. Now, you've talked about this theme in previous releases of AAP. So what's new in this release? What can customers do now that they couldn't do before? >> Yeah, it's a good question thank you. So, we look at this in two dimensions. So, the first dimension we have is like where automation can happen, right? So, you know, we always have traditional data center, clouds being been very prevalent for us for the last, you know, sort of five, 10 years in most people's view. But now we have the Edge, right? So now we have Edge computing, which is sometimes a lot more of the same, but also it comes with a different dynamic of how it has to be sort of used and utilized by different use cases, different industry segments. But then, while you expand the use cases to make sure that people can do automation where they need to do it and make sure if we don't close to the Edge or close to the data center, based on where the technology needs to be run, you also have to think about who's now using automation. So, the second dimension is making sure that different users can take access. You mentioned like application deployment, or infrastructure, or network configuration. We expand the number of different users we have that are starting to take advantage of Ansible. So how do we get more developers? How do we get into the developer workflow, into the development workflow, for how Ansible is created, as well as how we help with the operational, the posts deployment stage that people do operating automation, as well as then the running of Ansible Automation Platform itself. >> Excellent, okay. So, in thinking about some of those various roles or personas, I mean, I think about product leads. I would see developers, obviously you're going to be in there. Managers I would think want that view. You know the thrust seems to be, you're trying to continue to enhance the experience, for these personas and others, I suppose, with new tooling. Maybe you could add some color to that and what's happening in the market Tom if you take this and Rich chime in, what's happening in the market that makes this so important? Who are the key roles and personas that you're targeting? >> Yeah. So, there's a couple of things happening here. I mean, traditionally the people that had been using Ansible to automate their subsystems were the domain expert for that subsystem, right? I'm the storage operations team. I'm the network operations team. I'm using this tool to automate the tasks that I do day to day to operate my piece of the sub system. Now, what they're being asked to do is to expose that subsystem to other constituencies in the organization, right? So they had not, they're not waiting for a call to come in to say, can I have a network segment? Can I have this storage allocated to me? Can I deploy these servers so I can start testing or building or deploying my application. Those subsystems need to be exposed to those different audiences. And so the type of automation that is required is different. Now, we need to expose those subsystems in a way that makes those domain owners comfortable. So they're okay with another audience having access to their subsystem. But at the same time, they're able to ensure the governance and compliance around that, and then give that third-party that developer, that QE person, that man, that business, that line of business manager, whoever it might be, that's accessing that resource, a interface that is friendly and easy enough for them to do. It's kind of the democratization. I know it's a cliche, but the democratization of automated automation within organizations, giving them roles, specific experiences, of how they can access these different subsystems and speed their access to these systems and deploy applications. >> So if we could stay on that for a second, cause that's a complicated situation. You're now opening this up. You Richard mentioned the Edge. So you got to make sure that the person that's getting access has access, but then you also have to make sure that that individual can't screw it up, do things that you don't want that individual to do. And it's probably a whole other set of compliance issues and policy things that you have to bake in. Is that, am I getting that right? >> Yeah. And then that's the aspect of it. When you start to think, you know, Tom listed off there, you know, 10, you can just keep adding different sort of personas that individuals that work in roles, identify with as themselves. I'm a network person, I'm a storage person. To us they're all just Ansible users, right? There may be using a slightly different way, maybe using it slightly different places, but they're just an Ansible user, right? And so as you have, like those people that just like become organically, you've now got thousands potentially of Ansible users inside a large enterprise organization, or if you know, a couple of hundred if your smaller. But you're then go, well, what do I do with Ansible, right? And so at that point, you then start to say, now we try to look at it as what's their use of Ansible itself, because it's not just a command line tool. It's got a management interface, it's got analytics, we've got content management, we've got operational runtime, we've got responsiveness to, you know, disaster recovery scenarios for when, you know, when you need to be able to do certain actions, you may use it in different ways at different places. So we start, try and break out, what is the person doing with Ansible Automation Platform at this part of their workflow? Are they creating content, right? Are they consuming content, or are they operating that automation content for those other constituent users that Tom referred to. >> Yeah, that's really helpful because there's context, there are different roles, different personas need different contexts, you know, trying to do different things. Sometimes somebody just wants to see the analytics to make sure it's, you know, hey, everything's green, Oh, we got a yellow, versus, hey actually want to make some changes and I'm authorized to do so. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about containers. I want to understand how containers are driving change for customers. Maybe what new tools you're providing to support this space? What about the Edge? Yeah, how real is that in terms of tangible pockets or patterns that you can identify that require new types of capabilities that you're delivering? Maybe you can help us unpack that a little bit. >> Okay so, I think there's two ways to look at containers, right? So the first is how are we utilizing the container technology itself, right? So containers are a package, right? So the amount of work we've been doing as Ansible's become more successful in the last couple of years, separating content out with Ansible collections. The ability to bring back manage, control a containerized runtime of Ansible so that you can lifecycle it, you can deploy it, it becomes portable. Edge is important there. How do I make sure I have the same automation running in the data center as the same automation running out on the Edge, if I'm looking at something that needs to be identical. The portability that the packaging of the container gives us, is a fantastic advantage, given you need to bring together just that automation you want. Smaller footprint, more refined footprint, lifecycle manage footprint. But at the same time, containers are also a very useful way of scaling the operation, right? And so as red hat puts things like Open Shift out in all these different locations, how can we leverage those platforms, to push the runtime of Ansible, the execution component, the execution plane of Ansible. How into anywhere that's hospitable for it to run? And as you move out towards Edge, as you move further away from the data center, you need a more ubiquitous sort of like run-time plane that you can put these things on. So they can just spin up when as, and when you need to. Potentially even at the end, actually being on the device, because at the same time with Edge, you also have different limits around how Edge works. It's not just about, hey I'm wifi points in an NFL stadium, actually, you're talking about I'm at the end of a 2000 mile, you know, piece of cable on an oil pipeline or potentially I'm a refinery out in the Gulf of Mexico. You know, you've got a very different dynamic to how you interact with that end point, than you do when it's a nice big controlled network, you know, powered location, which is well-governed and well-orchestrated. >> That's good. Thank you Rich. So Tom, think about automation, you know, back in the day, seems like a long time ago, but it really wasn't, automation used to scare some IT folks, because you know, sometimes it created unintended consequences or maybe it was a cultural thing and that you didn't want to automate themselves out of a job, but regardless. The cloud has changed that mindset, you know, showing us what's possible. You guys obviously had a big role in that, and the pandemic and digital initiatives, they really have made I call it the automation mandate. It was like the fourth March to digital, at least that's how I see it. I wonder if you could talk about, how you see your users approaching automation in as it relates to their business goals. Do you think automation is still being treated sometimes with trepidation or as a side project for some organizations or is it really continuing to evolve as a mainstream business imperative? >> Yes, so Dave we see it continuing to evolve as a strategic imperative for our customers. I mean, you'll, hear some of the keynote folks that are speaking here today. I've done an interview or doing an interview with Joe Mills from Discover, talking about extreme automation throughout Discovers organization. You'll hear representatives from JPMC talk about 22,000 JPMC employees contributing automation content in their environment, across 20 or 22 countries. I mean, just think about that scale, and the number of people that are involved in automation now and their tasks. So I think it's, I think we are, we have moved beyond or are moving beyond that idea that automation is just there to replace people's jobs. And it's much more about automation replacing the mundane, increasing consistency, increasing security, increasing agility, and giving people an opportunity to do more and more interesting stuff. So that's what we hear from our customers, this idea of them building. And it's not just the technology piece, but it's the cultural piece inside organizations where they're building these guilds or communities of practice, bringing people together to share best practices and experience with automation, so that they can feel comfortable learning from others and sharing with others and driving the organization forward. So we see a lot of that, and you'll hear a lot of that, at some of the Ansible Fest sessions this week. >> Well, I mean though I think that's a really important point. The last point you made about the skills, because I think you're right. I think we have moved beyond it's just job replacement. I don't know anybody who loves provisioning LUNs and say, oh, I'm the best in the world at that. It's just kind of something that was maybe important 10, 15, 20 years ago, but today, he should let the machines do that. So that's the whole skills transformation, is obviously a big part of digital transformation. Isn't it? >> It absolutely is. And frankly, we still hear, it's an impediment, that skills shortages are still an impediment to our customer success. They are still skilling up. I mean, honestly, that's one of the differentiators, for Ansible, as a language, a human readable language, that is easy to learn, easy to use, easy to share across an organization. So that's why you see job boards, and whatnot with so many opportunities that require or, or ask for Ansible skills out there. It's just a, it's become sort of a ubiquitous automation language in organizations, because it can be shared across lots of different roles. You don't have to be a Ruby software developer or a Python software developer to create automation with Ansible. You can be Tom Anderson or Rich Henshall. You don't have to, you don't have to be the, you know, the, the sharpest software developer in the world to take advantage of it. So anyway, that's one of the things that kind of overcoming some of the skills apprehension and bringing people into this, into the kind of new environment, of thinking about automation as code, not software code, but thinking of it like code. >> Got it. Guys we've got to leave it there, but Rich, how about you bring us home. We'll give you the last word. >> I mean, I think, you know what Tom just said there I think, about the skills side of things, is I think that the part that made it resonates the most. I mean I was a customer before I joined Red Hat, and trying to get large numbers of people, onto a same path, to try and achieve that outbound objective, that an organization has. The objective of an organization is not to automate, it's to achieve what is needed by what the automation facilitates. So how do we get those different groups to go from, Hey, this is about me, to this is actually about what we're trying to achieve as a business what we're trying to facilitate as a business, and how do we get those people easier access, a reduced barrier of entry to the skills they need to help make that successful, that compliments what they do, in their primary role, with a really strong secondary skill set that helps them do all the bits and pieces they need to do to make that job work. >> That's great, I mean you guys have done a great job, I mean it wasn't clear, you know, decade ago, or maybe half a decade ago, who was going to win this battle. Ansible clearly has market momentum and has become the leader. So guys congratulations on that and good job. Keep it going. I really appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. Thanks. >> Okay. This is the cubes, continuous coverage of Ansible Fest, 2021. Keep it right there for more content that educates and inspires. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

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