(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of AnsibleFest 2021 virtual; I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got a great power panel here from Kyndryl whose great company has spun out of IBM. IT services great, technology, great conversation. Scott Kinane, director of worldwide automation, Anand Gopalakrishnan, chief automation architect, love the title, from Kyndryl, and Lisa Chavez, automations architect from Kyndryl. Guys, thanks for coming on. Appreciate the conversation. Looking forward to it. >> Thanks John glad to be here. >> Thank you. >> Scott, we covered you guys at IBM Think 2021, the new name, everything's happening. The extreme focus, the tactical execution has been pretty much on cloud, cloud native automation. This is the conversation. Knowing how much has gone behind the new name, can you just take a minute to share, give us an update on who Kyndryl is and how that's going? >> Yeah, I'd love to. You know, as Kyndryl, we really have the privilege of being responsible for designing, building, managing, and modernizing, you know, the mission critical systems that the world depends on every day, you know? When our thousands of clients span every industry and are leaders in their industries, right? You run the mission critical application environments for, you know, seven of the 10 largest airlines, 28 of the top 50 banks, right? All the largest mobile providers. You know, most of the largest retailers out there, and so on and so forth, right? That these companies really trust us to ensure that their business operations are really flawlessly being run. And operating our scale, and with the quality that these clients demand, is only possible by doing enterprise strength automation. Right? It's only, you know, it's not only about reactive automation, but using intelligent automation so we can predict and prevent issues before they really become a problem. Right? And because of our intelligent approach to automation, our clients have a... you know, they get tremendous business benefits for it, right? Retailers can open stores faster because systems and services are deployed more efficiently, right? Banks ATM's right, we all depend on those day to day, you know. They're working when you need them with our automation behind the scenes. You know, healthcare systems are more robust and responsive because we monitor for potential breaks and prevent them before they occur, right. Data processing systems, right. We hear about breaches all the time, right? Our clients are more secure because their environments are checked into, are checked to ensure that security exposures are quickly discovered and intermediated, right? So like automation, orchestration, intelligence, driving the world's digital economy, right. If you ask what Kyndryl is it, you know, that's our DNA. And it's really what we do well. >> Yeah, what's interesting, I want to get you to just quick followup on that because the name implies kind of a fresh perspective, working together. There's a lot of shared experiences and that. And the new normal now is honestly with hybrid and virtual continuing, people are doing things differently. And I would like you, if you don't mind taking a minute to share about the automation environment that you guys are operating in, because it's a different approach, but the game is still the same. Right? (John and Scott laugh) You got to make sure that these things are scaling and people are working again. So it's a combination of people and technology, in a new equation. Take a minute to talk about that. >> Yeah, I'd love to. You know, and you're right, right; the game is really changing. And automation is really ingrained into, needs to be ingrained in the way everybody's approaching what they do day to day. And if you talk about automation, in a way it's really included in what we do in our BAU delivery operations, right. And we do it at a tremendous scale, right. Where we have, you know, millions of infrastructure components and applications managed with automation, right. We're going to talk a little bit about CACF here in a few minutes, right? We've got over half a million devices themselves boarded onto that, and we're running over 11 million automations on a month to month basis through that, through the, the Red Hat technology that that's built on, right. We've got RPA as a key part of our environment, running millions of transactions through that on a yearly basis, right. And our automation's really covering the entire stack, right? It's not just about traditional IT, but we cover public cloud, private cloud, hybrid, you know, network components, applications and business processes, right? You talked about people, right. Help desk, right. We cover automation to automate a lot of the help desk processes are happening behind the scenes; security and resiliency. And it's really about driving all that through, you know, not just prescriptive reactions, but you know, us using our experience; insights we have from our data lakes, and intel, and AI ops technologies, and really making proactive based decisions based on that to really help drive the value back for our clients and to ensure that they're operating the way they need to. >> Yeah, that systems mindset, outcome driven focus is unique. That's awesome, congratulations. And onto Lisa, we're going to get into the architect side of it, because you're seeing more and more automation at the center of all the conversation. Reminds me of the machine learning AI vibe a couple of years ago. It's like, oh yeah, everything's MLAI. Automation, now everything's automation. Anand, your title is chief automation architect, love that title. What do you do? Like, I mean, you're architecting more automation, are you? Could you take a minute to explain your role? I love the title. And automation is really the technology driving a lot of the change. What do you do? >> Thank you, John. So let me first thank you for allowing us to come and speak to you and inform here about what we have done using Ansible and the other Red Hat products. So Ansible is one of the many products that we have used within Red Hat to support the solution that we have deployed, Paul, as our automation community framework, right? So, Scott touched upon it a few minutes earlier in terms of what are we doing for our clients? How do we make sure that our client's environment is secure? How do we make sure that our client environment is available all the time? So that... Are the infrastructure services that we're providing for our clients has a direct impact for their clients. So this is where the implementation of automation using the products that we have from Red Hat has helped us achieve. And we'll continue, we will continue to expand on supporting that, right. So let me break this into two parts. One is from an infrastructure standpoint, how we have implemented the solution and scaled it in such a way that we can support the number of devices that Scott was referring to earlier, And also the number of clients that we have touched on. And the second part, I'll let my colleague Lisa talk about the application architecture and the application scalability that we have, right? So firstly, we touch on infrastructure. So if you look at the way we needed to establish a capability to provide support for our clients, we wanted to make sure our infrastructure is available all the time, right? That's very important. So, before we even basically say, hey, we're going to make sure that our client's infrastructure is available all the time or our client's infrastructure is secure. And also we provide, we are able to provide the automation services for the infrastructure service that we're providing, right? So the stack that we built was to support our solution to be truly cloud native. So we began with of course, using OCP, which is the OpenShift cloud platform that we have. We relied on Red Hat CoreOS, which is basically enabling the automation platform to be deployed as a true cloud native application; that can be scalable to not just within one country, but multiple countries. Supporting data privacy that we need to have, supporting the compliance parts of that we need to support, and scalable to support the half a billion devices that we are supporting today. Right? So essentially, if you look at what we have, is a capability enabled on the entire stack of the Red Hat products that we have. And we are able to focus on ensuring that we are able to provide the automation by gaining efficiencies, right? If you look at a lot of automations that we have it's about biggest in complexities, right? So just think about the amount of risk that we are removing, and the quality that we are assuring from the qualified and standardized changes that we are basically implementing. Or, just, the amount of risk that we are able to eliminate by removing thousands of manual labor hours as well. So if you look at the automation need, it's not just about efficiency of the removal of labor hours, but efficiency of providing standards and efficiency of providing the capabilities that support our clients, who their needs; i.e. making sure that their infrastructure is compliant, their infrastructure is secure, and their infrastructure is highly available all the time. So it just basically making sure that we are able to address what we call as day one and day two activities, while we are able to support their day two infrastructure services activities; i.e. right from ground up. Building the server, which is provisioning, doing some provisioning activities, and deploying applications, and basically supporting the applications once they are deployed. So look at the scale, we have quite a bit there. >> So, you got the cloud native platform... >> Hey, careful Anand... >> You've got the cloud native platform, right? Let me just summarize that; cloud native platform for scale. So that means you're aligning, and targeting, and working with people who will want to do cloud native applications. >> Absolutely. >> And they want fast speed. (John laughing) >> Yes, and they want... >> They want everything to go faster. And by the way, the compliance piece is super important because if you can take that away from them, for waiting for the answers from the compliance department or security department, then that's the flywheel. Is that what you're getting at? This is the trend? >> Absolutely. So I'm going to turn it over to Lisa, who's going to help us. >> Yeah >> Go ahead Lisa >> Lisa, weigh in on the flywheel here. (Lisa chuckles) >> Yeah. Sure, sure. Yeah. So, so one of the things that CACF allows us to do, right, and it's again, as Anand described, `it's a very robust, powerful infrastructure. Supports many, many clients as we run a lot of applications through this infrastructure. And we do things like run security health checks on all our client's servers, and process the data real time and get that data out to our teams to address issues almost immediately, right? Scott touched on the fact that we are monitoring incident data real time and taking automated actions to correct problems in the environment. These are just really, really powerful capabilities that we're able to offer. We also have other use cases, we do a lot of identity management, primary and secondary controls through the CACF infrastructure. So we're able to have one point of connectivity into our client's environments. It's agentless, right, so you set up one connection to their servers and we can do a whole lot of management of various things through this single automation platform. So... >> So I, so that just to call this up, this is actually very powerful. And first of all, you mentioned the CACF that's the cloud automation community framework. >> Yes, correct. >> Right. >> Okay, so that's the platform. (Lisa chuckles) >> Yes >> Okay, so now the platforms' there; and now talk about the advantages. Because the power here is this truly highlights the transformation of DevOps, infrastructure as code, and microservices, coming around the corner where the developer; And I know developers want to build security into the applications from day one and take advantage of new services as they come online. That is now one. That puts the pressure on the old IT teams, the old security teams, who have been the NoOps. No, you can't do or slow, are slower. This is a trend, this is actually happening. And this culture shift is happening. Could you guys weigh in on that because this is a really important part of this story. >> Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, if you go back, circa 2019 or so, right. You know, we were back then and we were recognized as a leader in the automation space by a lot of the analysts. But we kind of look at that culture change you were just talking about and look at, you know, how do we become more agile? How do we go faster and what we're doing, right. And then I'm working with Jason McKerr and the Red Hat's Ansible automation platform team. We kind of define this platform that Lisa and Anand are talking to, right. Wrapping together, the OpenShift and Ansible, and 3scale with, you know, our services platform with Watson, and, and, you know, it really gave us the ability to leverage two of our core capabilities, right? The first, you know, in order for us to go faster, was our community model, right? Our community experience, right? So we've got a large delivery community that's out there really experts in a lot of, experts in a lot of technologies and industries. And, and by putting this in place, it gave us a way to really leverage them more in that community model development, so they could create, and we can harvest more of the automation playbooks. A lot of the different use cases that Lisa was talking incident remediation, patch scanning and deployment, security compliance, checking and enforcement. You know, basically anything that needs to get done as part of our what we'd call day one or day two operations we do for a client, right. And Steve's approach really to, to do a lot of high quality automation and get to the point where we could get thousands of automation modules that our clients could, that we could use as a part of our, a part of our services we delivered to the client environments. And, you know, that type of speed and agility, and being able to kind of leverage that was something that wasn't there previously. It also gave us a way to leverage, I guess they are one of our other core capabilities, right; which is a systems integrator, right? So we were able to focus more, by having that core engine in place, we were able to form focus more on our integrator experience and integrate, you know, IBM technologies, ServiceNow, ScienceLogic, VMware, and many more, right to the engine itself. So you know, basically, you know, all the applications out there that the, the clients then depend on for their business environments integrate directly with them; so we could more seamlessly bring the automation to their, to their environments, right. So it really gave us both the, the ability to change our culture, have a community model in place that we didn't before and really leveraged that services integrator expertise that we bring to the table, and act really fast on behalf of our clients out there. >> That's great stuff. Lisa, Lisa if you don't mind, could you share your thoughts on what's different about the community platform, and because automation has been around for a while, you do a couple of times, you do something repetitive, you automate it. Automate it out of way, and that's efficiency. Anand was the one saying that. >> Yeah but within Kyndryl, we have a very strong community and we have very strong security guidelines around what the community produces and what we deliver to our clients, right? So, we give our teams a lot of flexibility, but we also make sure that the content is very secure; we do a lot of testing. We have very strong security teams that do actual physical, penetration testing, right. They actually could try and come in and break things. So, you know, we really feel good about, you know, not only do we give our teams the flexibility, but we also, you know, make sure that it's safe for our clients. >> How's the relationship with Ansible evolving? Because as Ansible continues to do well with automation; automations now, like in automation as code, if things are discoverable, reuse is a big topic in the community model. How is Ansible factoring into your success? >> So... So firstly, I want to break this again into two discussions, right? One is the product itself. And second is how we have collaborated very closely with our colleagues at Red Hat, right? So essentially it's the feedback that we get from our clients, which is then fed into our solution, and then from our solution, we basically say, does it meet what our client's requirements are? If it doesn't, then we work with our Red Hat colleagues and say, hey, you know, we need some enhancements to be made. And we've been, we've been lucky enough to work with our colleagues at Red Hat, very closely, where we have been able to make some core product changes to support our clients requirements, right. And that's very, very important in terms of the collaboration from, with Red Hat, from a, you know, from a client standpoint. That's number one. Number two, from a product standpoint, Ansible, and the use of Ansible itself, right? Or Ansible Tower as the automation hub that we've been using. So we began this with a very base product capability, which was through what we call event automation. That was our first. Then we said, no, I think we can certainly look at expanding this to beyond event automation. I.e. can we do, when we say event that is very typically BAU activities, day two activities. But then we said, can we, can we do day one, day two infrastructure services automation? We said yes, why not? And then we worked again with our colleagues at Red Hat, identifying opportunities to improve on those. And we basically enhanced the framework to support those additional use cases that we basically identified. And as a matter of fact, we are continually looking at improving as well. In terms of not just hey, using the base product as is, but also receiving that feedback, giving that feedback to our Red Hat colleagues, and then implementing it as we go. So that's the, that's the approach we have taken. >> And what's the other half of the subject? Split it in two, What's the other half? >> Yep. But the other half is the actual implementation itself. So we like, which is basically expanding the use cases to go from beyond event automation to back from building the server, to also patching compliance. And now we're actually looking at even what we call service requests automation. By this is we basically want to be able to say hey user, we want a specific action to be performed on a particular end point. Can we take it to that next level as well? So that's where we are basically looking at as we progress. So we're not done. I would say we're still at the beginning of expansion. >> Yeah. >> Well no, I totally agree. I think it's early days, and I think a lot of it's, you mentioned day two operations; I love that. Day zero, day one, day two. Does anyone want to take a stab at defining what day two operations is? (John laughing) >> Do you want to go? >> Well, I got the experts here. It's good to get the definitions out there. >> Absolutely. >> 'Cause day one you're provisioned, right? >> Day zero, you provision. >> Day zero you provision. >> So day zero they look at... Yeah, so day zero you look at what is the infrastructure, what's the hardware that's there. And then day one you do what we call post provisioning activities, configuring everything that we need to do, like deploying the middleware applications, making sure the applications are configured properly, making sure that our, you know, the operating systems that we need to have. Whether it is a base operating system or operating systems for supporting the containers that are basically going to be enabled, all those will need to be looked at, right? So that's day one. Then day two is business as usual. >> Everything breaks on day two. (everyone laughs) >> Although I... >> Day one's fun, everything's good, we got everything up and running. We stood it up, and day two it breaks; And like, you know it's his fault. >> Exactly. >> Who's fault is it? (everyone laughing) So if you look at the approach that we took was, we said, let's start with the day two, then get to day zero, right. So which time where we have lots of lessons learned as we go through. And that's the expansion of how we are looking at Ansible. >> Well this is, all fun aside. First of all, it's all fun to have, to have to have jokes like that; but the reality is that the hardened operational discipline required to go beyond day one is critical, right? So this is where we start getting into the ops side where security downtime, disruptive operations, it's got to be programmable. And by the way, automation is in there too. So which means that it's not humans it's software running. Right? So, edge is going to complicate the hell out of that too. So, day two becomes super important from an architecture standpoint. You guys are the architects; what's the strategy, what should people be doing? What, what, how should, because day one is fun. You get it up, stand it up. But then it starts getting benefit; people start paying attention. >> Yep. _ And then you need to scale it and harden it. What's the strategy? What should people do? >> Yeah. I mean, if you think about automation, right? It's not... oh, I should, I meant to say John, you know, if it breaks, it's always Anand's fault, always Anand's. (John, Lisa, and Anand laugh) Don't ask any of that. >> I agree. >> Exactly. Thank you, Lisa. (everyone laughing) But, but automate, you know, you know, automation in a lot of conversations, people talk about it as gaining efficiency. And you know, it's not just that, you know, Automation is about de-risking complexities. Right? Think about all the risk that's removed, you know, and quality assured from the codified and standardized changes, right. Think about all the risk removed from eliminating, you know, tens of thousands of manual labor hours that have to be done. And those various things, right, that get done. So, for, we talk about day two operations, what we're doing, getting more automation in there, you know, our focus is definitely how do we de-risk changes? How do we make it safer for the clients? How do we make it more secure for the clients? And how do we ensure that their business operations, you know, are operating at their peak efficiencies? >> Yeah. And as I mentioned, we really go above and beyond on the security. We have much, much, much automated testing. And we also have the penetration testing I was talking about, so. We take security very seriously. Yeah. >> Yeah. >> I think what's interesting about what you guys are doing with the platform is, it's cloud native. You start to see not just the replatforming, but the fun parts. When you start thinking about refactoring applications and benefits start to come out of nowhere; I go new benefits, new net, new use cases. So I think the outcomes side of this is interesting. A lot of people talk about, okay let's focus on the cost, but there's now net new positive, potentially revenue impact for your customers. This is kind of where the game changes a lot. What do you guys think about that; 'cuz that's, you know, you always have this argument with folks who are very cost centric, repatriated for getting off the cloud, or let's look at the net new opportunities that are going to be enabled by rapid programming, identifying new workflows, automating them, and creating value. >> Yeah. I mean, this is, you know, you're talking about the future where we're going, things that we do, you know, obviously getting more closer to, and being directly aligned with the DevSecOps teams that are out there. You talk about day two, you know, the closer we are to those guys, the better for, for us and everybody else that's going there, going forward. You know, and as you know, businesses keep returning to their pre COVID level levels, you know, automation gives the possibility and that ones that we were doing gives possibility for hopefully the clients to do more of that revenue capture, right. Being able to, you know, be ahead a little bit earlier, being able to stand up retail stores faster, right. Being able to deploy business-based applications that are, generating revenue for the clients at a you know, you know, at a moment's notice. Things like that are really possible with automation, and possible with the way we've done this solution with Red Hat and our clients, right. And I think we've got tons of benefits there. We're seeing, you know, we've got almost 900 clients supported on it today, right. You know Anand hit on, we've got half a million plus devices that are connected to this, right. And we're seeing things where, you know, the clients are, are, that are on this are, are getting results, you know, Something such as 61% of all tickets being resolved with no human intervention, you know, 84% of their entire service base server base is being checked automatically for security and compliance daily. And, and, you know, we could go through lots of those different metrics, but the, you know, the fact we can do that for our clients gives, gives through automation, gives, you know, our engineers, our delivery community, the ability to closely more closely work with the client to do those revenue generation activities; to help them capture more, more revenue in the market. >> We'll just put that in context, the scale and speed of what's happening with those numbers; I mean, it's significant. It's not like it's a small little test. That's like large scale. Scale's the advantage of cloud. Cloud is a scale game. The advantage is scaling and handling that scale. What's your thoughts? >> Absolutely. So if you basically, again, when we started this, we started small, right. In terms of the use cases that we wanted to tackle, the number of devices that we said we could basically handle, right. But then once we saw the benefits, the initial benefits of how quickly we were able to fix some of the problems from a day one day, two standpoint; or address some of the compliance and patching issues that we needed to look at, right. We, we quickly saw opportunities and said, how fast can we go? And in terms of, well, it's not just how fast can we go in terms of setting up our own infrastructure by you know, saying, hey, we are cloud native. I can just spin up another container and, you know, make sure that I can have another a hundred servers onboarded to support, or a hundred that network devices to be onboarded to support and so on, right. So it was also the scale from a automation standpoint, where we needed to make sure that our resources were skilled, to develop the automations as well. So the scale is not in terms of just the infrastructure, but the scale is also in terms of people that can do the automation in terms of, you know, providing the services for our infrastructure, right. So that's how we approached it. People and then an application and infrastructure. So that included providing education in, in Kyndryl today rose to about 11,000 people that we have trained on Ansible, the use of Ansible, and the use of Ansible Tower, and just even doing development of the playbooks using Ansible. That's a theme. if you look at, if you look at, it's not just infrastructure scale. It's infrastructure scale, application to be able to scale to that infrastructure, and people to be able to scale to what we're trying to do to support our clients as well. >> I think the people think is huge because you have a side benefit here as harmony, and the teams. You got cohesiveness that breeds peace, not war. (everyone laughs) >> Absolutely. >> That's between teams. >> If you look at the, you know, the words that we said; cloud automation, community framework. If you really break it down, right, it's a framework, but for who? It's for the community. >> Yeah. >> But, what are they doing? They're building automation. >> Yeah >> And that is what >> The Security team wants to, >> the cloud is about, right? >> The security team wants to, make the apps go faster, The apps want to be fast, they don't want to be waiting. Everything's about going faster; Pass, shoot, score, as they say in sports. But, but, okay, I love this conversation. I think it's going to be the beginning of a big wave. How do people engage and how do I get involved if I want to use the cloud automation community framework? What's the consumption side for, how do you guys push this out there, and how do people engage with you? >> Scott do you want to take that one? >> Yeah. I mean the, the easiest way is, you know, Kyndryl, you know, we're, we're out there. We're, coming forward with our company, a spin off from IBM, come engage with our sales reps, come engage with our, our outsourcing, our social risk management service delivery organizations, and, and, you know, happy to get them engaged, get them on board, and get them using the automation framework we've got in place. >> That's awesome. Great. Well, great stuff. Love the automation conversation. Automation and hybrid are the big, big trends that are never going to stop. It's going to be a hybrid world we live in. And the edge is exciting. It's got, you mentioned the edge; it's just more and more action. It's a distributed computing paradigm. I mean, it really the same. We've seen this movie before Anand. Yeah, in tech. So now it's automation. So great stuff. Lisa, thank you for coming on; I appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thanks. >> Thank you, John. >> Thank you, John. We have coverage for Ansible Fest 2021. Power panel breaking down automation with Kyndryl. The importance of community, the importance of cohesiveness with teams, but more importantly, the outcome, the speed of development and security. I'm John for theCUBE, thanks for watching. (upbeat 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)