>>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 the Red Hat Summit 2020 course. The event this year is digital. We're talking to Red Hat executives, partners and customers where they are around the globe, pulling them in remotely happy to welcome back to the program. One of our Cube alumni on a very important topic, of course, that red hat open shift and joining me is Clayton Coleman. Who's the open shift chief architect with Red Hat. Clayton, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you >>for having me today. >>All right, So before we get into the product, it's probably worthwhile that we talked about you know what's happening in the community and talking specifically, you know, kubernetes the whole cloud, native space. Normally we would have gotten together. I would have seen you at Cube Con Ah, you know, at the end of March. But instead, here we are at the end of April. Looking out, you know, more CN cf events later this year, but first Red Hat Summit is a great open source event and broad community. So would really love your viewpoint as to what's happening in that ecosystem. >>It's been a really interesting year, obviously. Ah, with an open source community, you know, we react to this. Um, like we always react to all the things that go on in open source. People come to the community and sometimes they have more time, and sometimes they have less time. I think just from a community perspective, there's been a lot of people you know. It's reaching out to their colleagues outside of their companies, to their friends and coworkers and all of the different participants in the community. And there's been a lot of people getting together for a little bit of extra time trying todo, you know, connect virtually where they can't connect physically. And it's been it's been great to at least see where we've come this year. We haven't had Cube con and that'll be coming up later this year. But Kubernetes just had the 1 18 release, and I think Kubernetes is moving into that phase where it's a mature, open source project. We've got a lot of the processes down. I'm really happy with the work that the steering committee, um, has gone through. We handed off the last of the bootstrap Steering Committee members hand it off to the new, fully elected steering committee last year, and it's gone absolutely smoothly, which has been phenomenal on the The core project is trying to be a little bit more stable and to focus on closing out those loose ends being a little bit more conservative to change. And at the same time, the ecosystem has really exploded in a number of directions, as as Kubernetes becomes more of a bedrock technology for, um, enterprises and individuals and startups and everything in between. We've really seen a huge amount of of innovation in the space, and every year it just gets bigger and bigger. There's a lot of exciting projects that >>I >>have never even talk to somebody on the Kubernetes project. But they have made and build and, uh, and solve problems for their environments without us ever having to be involved, which I think it's success. >>Yeah, Clayton, you know, one of the challenges when you talk to practitioners out there is just keeping up with the pace of change. Can really be challenging. Something we really saw acutely was Docker was rolling out updates every six weeks. Most customers aren't going to be able to change fast enough to keep up with things you love your view point both is toe really what the CN CF says, as well as how Red Hat thinks of products. So you talked about you know, kubernetes 1.18. My understanding, even Google isn't yet packaging and offering that version there. So there's a lag between things. And as we start talking about managing across lots of clusters, how does Red Hat think of this? How should customers think about this? How do we make sure that we're, you know, staying secure and keeping updated on things without getting run over by the constant treadmill of >>change? That the interesting part about kubernetes Is it so much more than just that core project? You know, no matter what any of us in the in the core kubernetes project or in the products that red hat that build around open shift and layers on top, there's a There's a whole ecosystem of components that most people think of this fundamental to accomplishing building applications deploying them, running them, Whether it's their continuous integration pipelines or it's their monitoring stacks, we really as communities has become a little bit more conservative. >>Um, I >>think we really nail down our processes for taking that change from the community, testing it. You know, we run tens of thousands of automation tests a week on the latest and greatest kubernetes code, given time to soak, and we did it together with all those pieces of the ecosystem and then make sure that they work well together. And I've noticed over the last two years that the rate of oops we missed that in KUBERNETES 1 17 that by the time someone saw it, people are already using that that started to go down for us, it really hasn't been about the pace of keeping up with the upstream. But it's about making sure that we can responsibly pull together all the other ecosystem components that are still have much newer and a little bit. How do we say, Ah, they are then the exciting phase of their development while still giving ah predictable, reliable update stream. I would say that the challenges that most people are going to see is how they bring together all those pieces. And that's something that, on open shift, we think of as our goal is to help pull together all the pieces of this ecosystem, Um, and to make some choices for customers that makes sense and to give them flexibility where it's not clear yet what the right choice might be or where different people could reasonably disagree. And I'm really excited. I feel like we've got our We have a release cadence down and we're shipping the latest Cube after it's had time to quickly review, and I think we've gotten better and better at that. So I'm really proud of the team on Red Hat and how they've worked within the community so that everybody benefits from that in that testing of that stability. >>Great. I'd like to teach here, you dig in a little bit on the application side what's happening from the work loads that customers are using? Ah, what other innovations happening around that space? And how is Red Hat really helping? Really, The the infrastructure team and the developer team work even closer together, like Red Hat has done for a long time. >>This is This is a great question. I say There's two key, um, two key groups coming together. People are bringing substantial important critical production workloads, and they expect things both to just work, but also to be able to understand it. And they're making the transition. Ah, lot of folks I talked to were making the transition from previous systems they've got. They've been running open shift for a while, or they've been running kubernetes for a while, and they're getting ready to move, um, a significant portion of their applications over. And so, you know, in the early days of any project, you get the exciting Greenfield development and you get to go play with new technologies. But as you start moving your 1st 1 and then 10 and then 100 of your core business applications from the EMS or from bare metal into containers, you're taking advantage of that technology in a responsible way. And so the the expectations on us as engineers and community members is to really make sure that we're closing out the little stuff. You know, no bug is too small, but it can't trip up someone's production applications. So seeing a lot of that whether it's something new and exciting like, Um uh, model is a service or ai workloads or whether it's traditional big enterprise transaction processing. APS on the other side on that development, um, model I think we're starting to see phase to our community is 2.0, in the community, which is people are really leveraging the flexibility and the power of containers, things that aren't necessarily new to people who had. We got into containers early and had a chance to go through a couple of iterations. But now people are starting to find patterns that up level development teams, so being able to run applications the same way on a local machine as in a production environment. Well, most production environments are there now, and so people are really having toe. They're having to go through all of their tools and saying, Well, does this process that works for an individual developer also work when I want to move it there, my production or staging environments to production, and so on. New projects like K native and tectonic, which are kubernetes native, that's just one part of the ecosystem around development. On top of kubernetes, there's tons of exciting projects out there from companies that have adopted the full stack of kubernetes. They built it into their mindset, this idea of flexible infrastructure, and we're seeing this explosion of new ways where kubernetes is really just a detail, and containers are just the detail and the fact that it's running this little thing called Docker down at the heart of it. Nobody talks about anymore, and so that that transition has been really exciting. I think there's a lot that we're trying to do to help developers and administrators see eye to eye. And a lot of it's learning from the customers and users out there who really paved the way the which is the open source way. It's learning from others and helping others benefit from that. >>Yeah, I think you bring up a really important point we've been saying for a couple of years. Now that you know KUBERNETES should get to the point where it's boring and boring in a way also cause it's gonna be baked in everywhere we saw from basically customers just taking the code, really spending a lot of their own things by building the stack to, of course, lots of customers have used open shift over the year to If I'm adopting Public Cloud more and more, they're using those services from that standpoint. Can you talk a bit about how Red Hat is really integrating with public clouds? And you know your architectural technical philosophy on that? And how might that be? Differ from some other companies that you might call a little bit more, you know, Cloud of Jason, as opposed to being deeply integrated with the public cloud. >>The interesting thing about Kubernetes is that while it was developed on top of the clouds, it wasn't really built from Day one assuming a cloud underneath it. And I think that was an opportunity that we really missed. And to be fair, we had to make the thing work first before we depended on these unreliable clouds. You know, when we started, the clouds were really hitting their stride on stability and reliability, and people were it was the hot was becoming the obvious choice to some of what we've tried to do is take flexible infrastructure is a given, um, assume that the things that the cloud provides should be programmed for the for the benefit of the developer and the application, and I think that's a that's a key trend is we're not using the cloud because our administration teams want us. We're using the cloud because it makes us more powerful developers. That enables new scenarios. It shortens the the time between idea reality. What we have done in open shift is we've really built around The idea of open shift running on a cloud should take advantage of that cloud to an extreme degree, which is infrastructure could be flexible. The machines in that cluster need to come and go according to the demands of the applications on top of it. So giving a little bit more power to the cluster and taking a little bit of way from the cloud I'm. But that benefits. That also needs to benefit that those who are running on premise because I think, as you noted, our goal is you want this ubiquitous kubernetes environment everywhere, and the operations teams and the development teams and the Dev Ops teams in between need to have a consistent environment and so you can do this on the cloud. But you don't have that flexibility on premise. You've lost something. And so what we've tried to do as well is to think about those ideas that are what we think of as quote unquote cloud native that starts with a mutable operating systems. It starts with everything being declarative and working backwards from, you know, I wanna have 15 machines and then the cluster or controllers on the cluster say, Oh, well, you know, one of the machines has gone bad. Let's replace it on the cloud. You ask for a new I'm cloud infrastructure provider or you ask the the cloud a p i for a new machine, and then you replace it automatically, and no one knows any better on premise. We'd love to do the same thing with both bare metal virtualization on top of kubernetes. So we have that flexibility to say you may not have all of the options, but we should certainly be able to say, Oh, well, this hardware is bad or the machine stopped, so let's reboot it, and there's a lot of that same mindset that could be applied. We think that'll, um if you need virtualization, you can always use it. But virtualization is a layer on top benefits from some of the same things that all the other extensions and applications on top of kubernetes competitive trump. So trying to pay that layer and make sure that you have flexible, reliable storage on premise through our SEF and red hat storage products, which are built on top of the cluster exactly like virtualization, is both on top of the cluster. So you get cloud native storage mixed in working with those teams toe. Take those operational best practices. You know there's well, I think one of the things that interests me is no. 1 20 years ago, who was running an early version of SEF wouldn't have some approach to run these very large things that scales organizations like CERN have been using SEF for over a decade at extremely large scales. Some of what our mindset is we think it's time to bake some of that knowledge actually into our software for a very long time. We've kind of been building out and adding more and more software, but we always left the automation and the the knowledge about how that software supposed to be run to the side. And so by taking that and we talked about operators. Kubernetes really enshrines. This principle is taking that idea, taking some of that operational knowledge into the software we ship. Um, though that software can rely on kubernetes open shift tries to hide the details of the infrastructure underneath and our goal. I think in the long run it will just make everybody's lives easier. I shouldn't have to ship you a SEF admin for you to be successful. And we think we think there's a lot more room here that's really gonna improve how operations teams work, that the software that they use day to day. >>So Clinton you mentioned virtualization is one of the topics in there. Of course, virtualization is very prevalent in a customer's data center environment today. Red Hat open shift, oftentimes in data centers, is sitting on BM ware environments. Of course. Recently, VM Ware announced that they have kubernetes baked into the solution, and red hat has open shift with red hat virtualization. Maybe, you know, without going into too much depth, and you probably have breakouts and white papers on this. But you know what kind of decision point should customers be thinking about when they're deciding? Do I do this in bare metal. Do I do it in virtualization? What are some of the, you know, just high level trade offs there when they need to make those decisions, >>I think it's, um I think the 1st 1 is Virtualization is a mature technology. It's a known quantity for many organizations, and so those who are comfortable with virtualization, I'd say, like any responsible, uh, architecture engineering team. You don't want to stop using something that's working well just because you can. And a lot of what I would see as the transition that companies on is for some organizations without a big investment in virtualization. They don't see the need for it anymore, except as maybe a technical detail of how they isolate insecure workloads. One of the great things about virtualization technology that we're all aware of over the last couple years is it creates a boundary between work loads and the underlying environment. That doesn't mean that the underlying environment and containers can't be as secure or benefit from those same techniques. And so we're starting to see that in the community, this kind of spectrum of virtualization all the way from the big traditional virtualization to very streamlined, stripped down virtualization wrappers around containers. Um, like some of the cloud providers use for their application environments. So I'm really excited about the open source. Community is touching each of these points on the spectrum. Some of our goals are if you're happy with your infrastructure provider, we want to work well with, and that's kind of the pragmatic of everyone's on a different step in that journey. The benefit of containers is no matter how fast you make of VM, it's never gonna be quite as fast, is it containers. And it's never gonna be quite as easy for a developer to run on their laptop. And I think working through this is there's still a lot of work that we as a community to do around, making it easier for developers to build containers and test them locally in smaller environments. But all of that flexibility can still benefit from virtualization under later or virtualization used as an isolation technology. So projects like Kata and some of the work that's being done in the open source community around projects like firecracker taking the same, um, open source ideas and remixing them a different points gives us a lot of flexibility. So I would say, um, I'm actually less interested in virtualization then all of the other technologies that are application centric and at the heart of it, a VM isn't really a developer centric idea. It's specifically an administrative concept that benefits the administrator, and developers can take advantage of it. But I think all of the capabilities that you think of when you think about building an application like scaling out and making sure patches are applied, being able to roll back separating your configuration on then all of the hundreds of other levels of complexity that will add around that like service MASH and the ability to gracefully tolerate failures in your database. These were where I think, um, virtualization needs to work with the platform rather than being something that dominates how we think about the platform. It's application first, not being first. >>Yeah, no, you're absolutely right that the critique I've always given, you know for a number of years now is if you look at virtualization, the promise was, let's take that old application that probably should have been updated and just shove it in a VM and never think about it again. That's not doing good things for the user. So if I look at that at one end of the spectrum away at the other end of the spectrum, trying not to think about infrastructure, you mentioned K native s 01 of the things that you know I've been digging in tryingto learn more about at Red Hat Summit has really been the open shift server lists. So give us the update on that piece. Um, you know, that's obviously very different discussion than what we were just having from a virtualization standpoint. Eso How does open shift look at server lists? How does that tie into what? You know, if I'm doing server, listen, Amazon versus you know some of the other open source options for serverless. How should I be thinking about that? >>There's a lot of great choices on the spectrum out there. I think one of the interesting things and I love the word spectrum here because cane native kind of sits in a spot where it tries to be, as the name says, it tries to be as kubernetes native as possible, which lets you tap into some of those additional capabilities when you need it. And one of the things I've always appreciate it is the more restrictive framework is usually the better. It is doing that one thing and doing it really well. We learned this with rails. We learned this with no Js. And as people have built over the years, the idea of simple development platforms. The core function idea is a great simple idea, but sometimes you need to break out of that. You need extra flexibility or your application needs to run longer or slow Start is actually an issue. One of the things I think is most interesting about K native and I see comers and user. I think this way it's a good point. Um, that gives you some of the flexibility of kubernetes and a lot of the simplicity of, um, the functions is a service, but I think that there's going to be an inevitable set of use cases that tie into that which are simpler where open organization has a very opinionated way of running applications, and I think that flexibility will really benefit K native. Whereas some of the more opinionated remarks around server lists lose a little bit of that. So that's one dimension that I still think a native is well positioned to kind of capture the broadest possible audience, which for kubernetes and Containers was kind of our mindset. We wanted to solve enough of the problems that you can solve. You can run all your software. We don't have to solve all those problems to such a level that there's endless complexity, although we've been accused of having endless complexity and Cooper days before, but just trying to think through what are the problems that everyone's going to have to give them a way out? I'm at the same time for us, when we think about prioritization functions is service about integration. It's about taking applications and connecting them, connecting them through kubernetes. And so it really depends on identity and access to data and tying that into your cloud environment. If you're running on top of a cloud or tying it into your back end databases, if your on premise, >>I >>think that is where the ecosystem is still working to bring together and standardize some of those pieces in kubernetes or on top of Kubernetes. What I'm really excited about is the team as much. You know, there's been this core community effort to get a native to a G, a quality. Alongside that, the open shift serverless team has been trying to make it a dramatically simpler action. If you have kubernetes and open shift, it's a one click action to get started with, Um Kay native and just like any other technology. How accessible it is determines how easy users find it to get started and to build the applications they need. So for us, it's not just about the core technology. It's about someone who's not familiar with Serverless or not familiar with kubernetes. Bring up an editor and build a function and then deploy it on top of open shift. See it scale out like a normal kubernetes application, not having to know about pods or persistent volumes or notes. And so these air, these are some of the steps. I've been really proud that the team's done. I think there's a huge amount of innovation that will happen this year and next year, as the maturity of the kubernetes ecosystem really grows up, we'll start to see standardized technologies, for I'm sharing identity across multiple clouds across multiple environments. It's no good if you've got these applications on the cloud that need to tie into your corporate L dap. But you can't connect your corporate held up to the cloud. And so your applications need 1/3 identity system. Nobody wants 1/3 identity system. And so, working through some of this thing where the challenges I think that hybrid organizations are already facing and our job is just to work with them in the open source communities and with the cloud providers partner with them and open source so that the technologies in kubernetes fit very well into whatever environment they run it. Alright, >>well, Clayton, really appreciate all the updates there. I know the community is definitely looking forward to digging through some of the breakout sessions reading all the new announcements. And, of course, we look forward to seeing you on the team participating in many of the kubernetes related events happening later this >>year. That's right. It's ah, gonna be a good year. >>All right. Thanks so much for joining us. I'm still Minuteman and as always thank you for watching you. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah