>> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AnsibleFest 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host. Got two great guests here. Dave Lindquist Vice President of Software Engineering at Red Hat and Matthew Jones, Chief Architect, and Ansible Engineer Architect of the automation platform. Matthew, great to see you, Dave, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on for the, for this CUBE conversation. >> Great to see you John, thank you. >> So the big theme here is automation, we've been talking about it for a while. Dave, I think last year we hit this point a couple of times hard. This year, it's kind of going mainstream and it's really exciting because like, this is stuff that's been kind of going around. So it's been growing rapidly. So building on the themes from last year, throughout this year and cloud native with the edge right around the corner, automation is growing rapidly. Okay, so what arenas do you guys think we're in the too hard, too easy, you know, comments like yeah, repetitive tasks are good, but it's more complicated than that now. Are there areas that your customers think are better for automation than others? Can you guys introduce where the action is? >> Sure. Well, I'll get started John. We are clearly seeing an acceleration at our applied automation across full life cycles, across domains. If you step back and think about the journey, many customers are on with their development environments, continuous delivery, inter-cloud, hybrid cloud. The challenges are how to accelerate the use of automation across the full life cycle, across your workloads, across security compliance, across networking, across storage, how to remediate situations. So it's just an acceleration of how do you apply automation into all these different domains? >> Is there areas specifically you think customers thought, no, we'll never going to get there that they're getting there now? Is there specific things you're seeing low-hanging fruit or is there a clear path? What do you guys see about that? Cause you know, this is now we're seeing things now that certainly with the pandemic, a lot more visibility into automation with cloud scale. Is there areas where your customers are saying I didn't think I can get that. Now we can get that. Now we can automate that. >> Yeah. I think a couple of areas jump to mind quickly. One is sometimes referred to as a shift left, but how do you start bringing automation earlier, earlier into the life cycle? One of the things we talked about last year that we've been building on is with advanced cluster management and containers and Kubernetes. And how do you insert automation from Ansible into all the different life cycles? Whether it's setting up clusters, it's deploying applications, it's remediating from security events or compliance activities that's, we're starting to see where customers are really starting to push the envelope on their use automation across those life cycles. >> Matt, how has Ansible evolving to address the demands we've heard in previous interviews with customers specifically to grow past their traditional management automation environments, because that's the real action here. What are you guys doing to address those demands? >> Yeah, you're, you're exactly right. Our, the way that we're evolving is in you know, right. Like we, where we've started as with basic command line tools, really basic integration with systems that developers have been familiar with for years, decades, right? Where we want to grow into is the native automation that makes up the cloud that makes up the services and infrastructure that not just developers interface with, but administrators, DevOps, SRE, common users, normal people who are just trying to get things done. We want to meet them at the systems and at the footprints that they expect. And that's what we want to do. And that the systems and the tools that we're introducing this year, next year, that we've been working on through the pandemic. So I'm moving the ball forward into those areas. >> W what's been along those lines, what's been the, the thought around footprint expansion. Cause that's become a big topic, right? I want to expand my automation space. I want to hire more people. Good luck with that. And it's hard to hire people in this market, but again, automation is, is a human machine and software perspective. So you still need humans. So footprint, automation and team scale. Can you talk about that, Matthew? What do you think about that? >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, we've spent a lot of time focusing on automation in the system space and how these tools connect to those systems and a big theme this year of AnsibleFest has been, how do we, how do we get back to the tools and the processes that people are using and people are building to do that. We've, we've created a whole developer focus space within the automation platform, a suite of tools that integrate into their development environments, their own automation workflows, making it easier to share and collaborate on automation, building communities within their organizations and among their, their internal stakeholders. And I think you'll see that represented here at AnsibleFest and the dedication to those tools and the integration of workloads and not just, not just the tools that they've had before, but the tools that they're learning and gaining experience with right now, the container based workloads and how do we share automation and verify and validate feel good about that automation that it's going to work when we go to production with it, those are the kinds of tools and processes that we're developing and delivering for our customers, for the community, for their stakeholders in their community also. >> What's the big updates this year at AnsibleFest for those people who want to jump in and make and have it be easier for teams to use Ansible and experienced Ansible. And also for the new, the newbies people coming in who are new to automation that could be savvy developers. I mean, people are shifting left with security and everyone's bolting on automation and, or planning it in from the beginning on architecture. So you're seeing a new, a new user base come in to answer well, that's what I hear. What, what specifically are you guys announcing? >> And those new people, they need to be able to come into an organization's process and get up to speed on what their automation, what automation they're working on and learn the ropes, be able to share and collaborate with people who are automating in this space already. We need to be able to give them access to documentation and tooling that helps them get started right away rather than having to fumble around the documentation, have meetings and learn the ropes. We want, we want to make the smooth and, and we want the pipeline of automation to go from the developer and their team into the content publisher publishing and management of automation hub using collections and execution environments that we're introducing here. The same things that they work on and build and produce as automation developers are what they'll use in the automation platform to actually run the automation. And that feels really good, right? The things that you're seeing on your developer workspace that you share with your team and your internal community, you can follow it right through your editor, your ID, through to automation hub. You're going to proving the content right out through automation controller and the automation platform through running that automation. >> Yeah, I think this is a huge point. I mean, Matthew nailed it. I think you have to have the, the ability to go from newbie accelerate quickly to expert because you know, this is the cloud that's cloud scale. There's the life cycle of software development is changing. It's very agile. It's very integrated and newbies can come in quickly and be awesome fast. It's not, you don't need to go to the training old school kind of training modules and get ramped up. You could be instantly running hard. So I think that's a huge point. And we're hearing that. So congratulations. Dave, I want to bring you in and talk about the, how other Ansible adjacent systems that you oversee come together with this release of Ansible. So, so what does it mean for the products okay. That are working together in the management space, because you know, you now have Ansible great track record. Now you have a system in these distributed systems now, enterprising cloud environments or systems working together. What's the impact. >> Yeah, no great question, John, maybe just to start to follow on some of the areas that Matthew was going through, some of the advances in Ansible automation platform are really to ease the deployment and then be able to grow that deployment with scale and distribution, putting execution nodes, wherever you, wherever those nodes need to be the ability to simplify, creating content, access to content collections so that the automation maturity and the use automation can grow. So that couples very nice with many of the investments we have in the broader space of, of management around advanced cluster management for Kubernetes, with ACM around, around our insights, around our edge management initiatives across, across the board. So what I'm seeing, what we're all seeing is how many of the solutions are looking at how you bring many of these disciplines to Garret together. For example, how do we start realizing the promise of event driven architectures from insights? How can we understand what's happening with workloads or infrastructure or compliance issues? And then from the management systems, we can pick up the inventory and the workload and all the specifics about that workload. And then with Ansible, we can then automate and remediate either scale that workload address a, you know, your, your service management processes or hook into even remediation say of a compliance issue. So you're basically bringing together insights with policy, during mechanisms with the automation capabilities of Ansible, which is fascinating and how we start building much more robust automation solutions. Which are required where everything's headed in this hybrid cloud environment. >> I mean, what are some of the challenges that your customers have on that point? There's robust solutions are what everyone wants. It's a natural extension. I mean, you can see what you just laid out. What, what are some of the customer challenges, data that you're seeing there, because this is a path everyone's going down, I'm hearing people discuss this, you know, in the hallways and virtual hallways these days. But you know, for the most part, like, okay, I, I know what I know. I love what I have. I got to start connecting these other adjacent systems together and make them work and automate together. What's the biggest challenge is, is it culture? Is it blockers? Or what's the, or that evolution, maybe you can weigh in too, if you want, this is, this is the key question that everyone's asking. >> Yeah, it's a, it's a key question. And these challenges have been around for some time. One of the, one of the more complex things always in maturing, the use of automation is the interaction with a lot of the existing processes that teams use, which are usually focused on particular domains. So many of the areas that we've been talking about automating the full, the fuller lifecycle is you're actually cutting across the domains and intersecting integrating with many of, many of the processes. So how do you allow the customer to incrementally evolve the automation of these processes across the domains, which brings in identity and access and authorization. It brings in visibility into the resources and the applications and the dependencies. And then of course the wealth of automation, the collections and the playbooks, essentially the content. How do you bring the content together? So the challenges are how do you allow the collaboration across the processes. How do you accelerate access to the content? And then how do you have a level of control to grow identity and access and authentication systems? >> That's awesome. Matthew, what's your reaction on this? Because I mean, you architected the system and you have to envision it working in the future as a lot of headroom involved in this area a lot of automation, what's the blockers? And what's the customer challenges right now that you see that can be easily turned into opportunities. >> Yeah. You know, the culture of automation is so different between, between the different between the different parts of the community, right? Developers expect something completely different than dev ops and network administrators, systems administrators. They just have different expectations on how automation should work. I've been writing software for a long time and the, the, the tension and conflicts between the teams can be extreme sometimes, right? We want to build and design automation capability that works in the domains that each of those people work in so that they can meet in the middle with a common set of tools. Dave mentioned identity, and event based automation, we all know that there are common things that are needed, but we also know that there are different ways to kind of achieve that depending on the space that you're in. And so a lot of, a lot of that has to do with these teams, being able to meet in the middle, collaborate on the automation, use content in the way that they expect, and then still provide that governance and reassurance that it's going to work and do the things that they want to do. Everything that we're doing here is about enabling that and supporting them. >> That's a great point. And I'd say that now more than ever this cultural, I won't say collision, there's always been tension as long as I can remember going back to my career in the eighties. When I started coding back in the day and the systems revolution, it was always tension between these groups because they had their own different worlds and they, (indistinct). But now with automation, there's almost like a peace treaty evolving where the speed game and cloud development becomes the unifying factor, right? If you can enable systems that can go faster because what this, what pisses people off, when someone's slower than they are. Where's that update, or, you know, but now we had harmony, this is cult. This is (indistinct), not touchy feely, Matthew. This is kind of what's going on right now. And David I'd love your reaction because this is like state-of-the-art issue. >> This is this a state-of-the-art particularly when we push the envelope on event driven automation, which leads right into AI ops and edge management and bleach fleet management. Being able to do this automation at scale at tremendous scale, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of endpoints. But let's also, we also have to keep in mind is behind all this is, how do you control the environment? How do you really lock down the security? How do you lock down the full supply chain in this automation, from the content creation to the execution, to what's being authorized to the policies? So these are all the pieces that we're investing in to start pulling together so that we can really push the envelope where automation is taking businesses and their ability to react to change and opportunities and challenges, but also in a controlled manner. >> Yeah. Give me infrastructure code, give me network security and transit and all that good stuff that goes on the network layer. And that mean push code when I want and automate the stuff that pisses people off. And we all get along, right? Matthew is, that's the, that's the future. >> That's right. None of it's optional anymore. Right? There's a lot of people out there. We see that with vulnerabilities and, and security issues that have cropped up over the, over the last year. It's, it's got to be one of the most important things that every organization is thinking about. >> Yeah, I think this site, this whole unification benefit is, is one of the most beautiful things that comes out of the technical benefits of the speed and the, and the advantages of, of the time to value with, with the enablement there. So I think that this is a really cutting edge issue. And thanks for bringing that up and, and discussing, and we're going to continue to talk more about it because we're seeing it very positive outcomes come from this with when you have all of these operational things automating away and then enabling more faster development for modernization. So thanks for, thanks for sharing that. So I just want to close out Matthew with you on saying, congratulations. I know you've been involved a lot of history with Ansible, but I got to ask you, what are you looking forward to most with this release? >> Oh, that's, that's such a good question because the engineering team working, working on some of the core features that we're bringing this time around, we have something that we'd been working on for years now, and it's all coming together with this release. We're really excited about it. Then we've talked a little bit before about collections and execution environments. You know, that goes back to AnsibleFest last year was like, what are we, what are we bringing this year? What, what are we giving you a window into, into our minds? And, you know, we talked about developer tools, but one of the things we've we've spent the most time on is how can we give you that window into your automation, worldwide planet, planet scale, data centers, clouds. It doesn't matter. You, you should be able to run automation anywhere that you need automation to run the Ansible automation platforms, automation mesh lands in this release. And it's the thing I'm most excited about because it gets that automation out to where you need it to run. If you're defining and governing your automation on the east coast of the U S and deploying it on the west coast in Asia, in Europe. Now you can do that and feel really good that it's going to work. It's survivable, it's reliable and it's fast. And the automation mesh brings, brings that to the production side, Ansible automation. And it works with the collections and the execution environments and the developer tools that we built around that to make sort of one scene one system for worldwide automation. And we'll spend the next year building on top of these technologies that we've mentioned that Dave's mentioned event based automation, compliance governance. Now we have the foundation we can build on to really, really sort of take it into the future next. >> You feel there's a lot of headroom there for innovation. >> Tons of headroom. >> Right? >> It's something we're really excited about. >> It's kind of like, it's like, when's the air conditioning going to come out? And they got all these new features coming out. You got to have great stuff there. Congratulations, Dave, we'll end it with you. I want to get your thoughts as AnsibleFest continues to have success with the community. The larger cross domain point that you brought up was key will be a coop con open sources continue to be a tailwind for developers and AI ops. Now you've got the edge exploding with value, new architectures, distributed computing, you know, Red Hats in the middle of it at many levels. What's your take on this revolution in software engineering, as opensource continues to drive as, and, and this new agile and automation kicks in, what's the impact? How do you see that this impacting the, the software, careers and outcomes of producing software? >> Well, the impact of open communities, ecosystems is incredible. It has been for years, and it just continues to accelerate. What I look forward to John with Fest and through this year, and next year is how is how we help bring together the wealth and capabilities of automation to enterprises to scale it to the enterprise across all the areas that they're driving towards. And you rattled off quite a few of them, including edge and security and how we bring the open communities, the open ecosystems, the content creation together with to deliver this value with customers. The growth has been incredible in this space. I don't see it slowing down. I just see it accelerating as the demands on businesses to really accelerate their delivery of new capabilities into market in new regions, with edge in a secure, in a secure manner. So being able to pull the open communities together and scaling this across enterprises, that that's the impact we're having. And it's great. >> It's really like, it's really almost a pinch me moment where you go, Hey, you know, a lot of the stuff we used to worry about is actually being solved. People are getting along scale is the new competitive advantage, modern applications, driving business value. This is kind of like nirvana coming around the corner it's happening. I mean, this is like what we, we, we would, we talked about decades ago, like technology will evolve to a point where it's faster and contributing more to humans. >> Yes, exactly, exactly. >> Great stuff. Okay, Matthew, thank you so much for coming on, Dave. Thank you for sharing. Congratulations. Great event. Stay, stay right there for more continued coverage of AnsibleFest, 2021. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. I'm your host with theCUBE John Furrier. And we've got two great guests. A CUBE alumni, Robyn Bergeron, senior manager, Ansible community team. Welcome back, she's with Ansible and Red Hat. Good to see you. And Matt Jones, chief architect for the Ansible Automation Platform. Again, both with Red Hat, Ansible was acquired by Red Hat. Robyn used to work for Red Hat, then went to Ansible. Ansible got bought by Red Hat. Robyn, great to see you, Matt, great to see you. >> Yep, thanks for having me back again. It's good to see you. >> We're not in person. It's the virtual event. Thanks for coming on remotely to our CUBE virtual, really appreciate it. I want to talk about the, and I brought that Red Hat kind of journey Robyn. We talked about it last year, but it really is an important point. The roots of Ansible and kind of where it's come from and what it's turned into and where it is today, is an interesting journey because the mission is still the same. I would like to get your perspectives because you know, Red Hat was acquired by IBM, Ansible's under Red Hat, all part of one big happy family. A lot's going on around the platform, Matt, you're the chief architect, Robyn you're on the community team. Collections, collections, collections, is the message, content, content, content, community, a lot going on. So take a minute, both of you explain the Ansible roots, where it is today, and the mission. >> Right, so beginning of Ansible was really, there was a small team of folks and they'd actually been through an iteration before that didn't use SSH called Funk, but you know, it was, let's make a piece of software that is open source that allows people to automate other things. And we knew at the time that, you know, based on a piece of research that we had seen out of Harvard that having a piece of software be architected in a modular fashion wasn't just great for the software, but it was also great for developing pathways and connections for the community to actually contribute stuff. If you have a car, this is always my analogy. If you have a car, you don't have to know how the engine works in order to swap out the windshield wipers or embed new windshield wipers, things like that. The nice thing about modular architectures is that it doesn't just mean that things can plug in. It means you can actually separate them into different spots to enable them to be plugged in. And that's sort of where we are today with collections, right? We've always had this sense of modules, but everything except for a couple of points in time, all of the modules, the ways that you connect Ansible to the vast array of technologies that you can use it with. All of those have always been in the full Ansible repository. Now we've separated out most of, you know, nearly everything that is not absolutely essential to having in a, you know, a very minimal Ansible installation, broken them out into separate repositories, that are usually grouped by function, right? So there's probably like a VMware something and a cloud something, and a IBM, z/OS something, things like that, right? Each in their own individual groups. So now, not only can contributors find what they want to contribute to in much smaller spots that are not a sea of 5,000 plus folks doing work. But now you can also choose to use your Ansible collections, update them, run them independently of just the singular release of Ansible, where you got everything, all the batteries included in one spot. >> Matt, this brings up the point about she's bringing in more advanced functionality, she's talking about collections. This has been kind of the Ansible formula from the beginning in its startup days, ease of use, easy, fast automation. Talk about the, you know, back in 2013 it was a startup. Now it's part of Red Hat. The game is still the same. Can you just share kind of what's the current guiding principles around Ansible this year? Because lots going on, like I said, faster, bigger, a lot going on, share your perspective. You've been there. >> Yeah, you know, what we're working on now is we're taking this great tool that has changed the way that automation works for a lot of people and we want to make it faster and bigger and better. We want it to scale better. We want it to automate more and be easier to automate, automate all the things that people want to do. And so we're really focusing on that scalability and flexibility. Robyn talked about content and collections, right? And what we want to enable is people to bring the content collections, the collections, the roles, the models, and use them in the way that they feel works best for them, leaving aside some of the things that they maybe aren't quite as interested in and put it together in a way that scales for them and scales for a global automation, automation everywhere. >> Yeah, I want to dig into the collections later, Robyn, for sure. And Matt, so let's, we'll put that on pause for a minute. I want to get into the event, the virtual event. Obviously we're not face to face, this year's virtual. You guys are both keynoting. Matt, we'll start with you. If you can each give 60 seconds, kind of a rundown of your keynote talk, give us the quick summary this year on the keynotes, Matt, we'll start with you. >> Yeah. That's, 60 seconds is- >> If you need a minute and a half, we'll give you 90 seconds, Robyn, that's going to be tough. Matt, we'll start with you. >> I'll try. So this year, and I mentioned the focus on scalability and flexibility, we on the product and on the platform, on the Ansible Automation Platform, the goal here is to bring content and flexibility of that content into the platform for you. We focused a lot on how you execute, how you run automation, how you manage your automation, and so bringing that content management automation into the system for you. It's really important to us. But what we're also noticing is that we, people are managing automation at a much larger scale. So we are updating the Ansible Tower, Ansible AWX, the automation platform, we're updating it to be more flexible in how it runs content, and where it can run content. We're making it so that execution of automation doesn't just have to happen in your data center, in one data center, we recognize that automation occurs globally, and we want to expand that automation execution capability to be able to run globally and all report back into your central business. We're also expanding over the next six months, a year, how well Ansible integrates with OpenShift and Kubernetes. This is a huge focus for us. We want that experience for automation to feel the same, whether you're automating at the edge, in devices and virtual machines and data centers, as well as clusters and Kubernetes clusters anywhere in the world. >> That's awesome. That's why I brought that up earlier. I wanted to get that out there because it's worth calling out that the Ansible mission from the beginning was similar scope, easy to do and simplify, but now it's larger scale. Again, it's everywhere, harder to do, hence complexity being extracted away. So thank you for sharing. We'll dig into that in a second. Okay, Robyn, 60 seconds or more, if you need it, your keynote this year at AnsibleFest, give us the quick rundown. >> All right. Well, I think we probably know at this point, one of the main themes this year is called automate to connect and, you know, the purpose of the community keynote is really to highlight the achievements of the community. So, you know, we are talking about, well, we are talking about collections, you know, going through some of the very broad highlights of that, and also how that has contributed, or, not contributed, how that is included as part of the recent release of Ansible 2.10, which was really the first release where we've got it very easy for people to actually start using collections and getting familiar with what that brings to them. A good portion of the keynote is also just about innovation, right? Like how we do things in open source and why we do things in certain ways in open source to accelerate us. And how that compares with the Red Hat, traditional product model, which is, we kind of, we do a lot of innovation upstream. We move quickly so that if something is maybe not the right idea, we can move on. And then in our products, that's sort of the thing that we give to our customers that is tried, tested and true. All of that kind of jazz. We also talk about, or I guess I also talk about the, all of our initiatives that we're doing around diversity and inclusiveness, including some of the code changes that we've made for better, more inclusive language in our projects and our downstream products, our diversity and inclusion working group that we have in the community land, which is, you know, just looking to embrace more and more people. It's a lot about connectivity, right? To one of Matt's points about all the things that we're trying to achieve and how it's similar to the original principles, the third one was, it's always, we need to have it to be easy to contribute to. It doesn't necessarily just mean in our community, right? Like we see in all of these workplaces, which is one of the reasons why we brought in Automation Hub, that folks inside large organizations, companies, government, whatever it is, are using Ansible and there's more and more, and, you know, there's one person, they tell their friend, they tell another friend, and next thing you know, it's the whole department. And then you find people in other departments and then you've got a ton of people doing stuff. And we all know that you can do a bunch of stuff by yourself, but you can accomplish a lot more together. And so, making it easy to contribute inside your organization is not much different than being able to contribute inside the community. So this is just a further recognition, I think, of what we see as just a natural extension of open source. >> I think the community angle is super important 'cause you have the community in terms of people contributing, but you also have multiple vendors now, multiple clouds, multiple integrations, the stakeholders of collaboration have increased. It was just like, "Oh, here's the upstream and et cetera, we're done, and have meetings, do all that stuff." And Matt, that brings me to my next question. Can you talk about some of the recent releases that have changed the content experience for the Ansible users in the upstream and within the automation platform? >> Well, so last year we released collections, and we've really been moving towards that over the 2.9, 2.10 timeframe. And now I think you're starting to see sort of the realization of that, right? This year we've released Automation Hub on cloud.redhat.com so that we can concentrate that vendor and partner content that Red Hat supports and certifies. In AnsibleFest you'll hear us talk about Private Automation Hub. This is bringing that content experience to the customer, to the user of this content, sort of helping you curate and manage that content yourself, like Robyn said, like we want to build communities around the content that you've developed. That's the whole reason that we've done this with collections is we don't want to bind it to Ansible core releases. We don't want to block content releases, all of this great functionality that the community is building. This is what collections mean. You should be free to use the collections that you want when you want it, regardless of when Ansible core itself has released. >> Can you just take a minute real quick and just explain what is collections, for folks out there who are rich? 'Cause that's the big theme here, collections, collections, collections. That's what I'm hearing resonate throughout the virtual hallways, if you will. Twitter and beyond. >> That's a good question. Like what is a collection itself? So we've talked a lot in the past about reusable content for Ansible. We talk a lot about roles and modules and we sort of put those off to the side a little bit and say, "These are your reusable components." You can put 'em anywhere you want. You can put 'em in source control, distribute them through email, it doesn't matter. And then your playbooks, that's what you write. And that's your sort of blessed content. Collections are really about taking the modules and roles and plugins, the things that make automation possible, and bundling those up together in groups of content, groups of modules and roles, or standing by themselves so that you can decide how that's distributed and how you consume that, right? Like you might have the Azure, VMware or Red Hat satellite collection that you're using. And you're happy with that. But you want a new version of Ansible. You're not bound to using one and the same. You can stick with the content that matters to you, the roles, the modules, the plugins that work for you. And you decide when to update those and you know, what the actual modules and plugins you're using are. >> So I got to ask the content question, you know, I'm a content producer. We do videos as content, blog posts content. When you talk about content, it's code, clarify that role for us because you got, you're enabling developers with content and helping them find experts. This is a concept. Robyn, talk about this. And Matt, you can weigh in, too, define what does content mean? It means different things. (indistinct) again, content could be. >> It is one of those words, it's right up there with developers, you know, so many different things that that can mean, especially- >> Explain content and the importance of the semantics of that. Explain it, it's important that people understand the semantics of the word "content" with respect to what's going on with Ansible. >> Yeah, and Matt and I actually had a conversation about the murkiness of this word, I believe that was yesterday. So what I think about our content, you know, and I try to put myself in the mind, my first job was a CIS admin. So I try to put myself in the mind of someone who might be using this content that I'm about to attempt to explain. Like Matt just explained, we've always had these modules, which were included in Ansible. People have pieces of code that show very basic things, right? If I get one of the AWS modules, it would, I am able to do things like "I would like to create a new user." So you might make a role that actually describes the steps in Ansible, that you would have to create a new user that is able to access AWS services at your company. There may be a number of administrators who want to use that piece of stuff, that piece of code over and over and over again, because hopefully most companies are getting bigger and not smaller, right? They want to have more people accessing all sorts of pieces of technology. So making some of these chunks accessible to lots of folks is really important, right? Because what good is automation, if, sure we've taken care of half of it, but if you still have to come up with your own bits of code from scratch every time you want to invoke it, you're still not really leveraging the full power of collaboration. So when we talk about content, to me, it really is things that are constantly reusable, that are accessible, that you tie together with modules that you're getting from collections. And I think it's that bundle, you can keep those pits of reusable content in the collections or keep them separate. But, you know, it's stuff that is baked for you, or that maybe somebody inside your organization bakes, but they only have to bake it once. They don't have to bake it in 25 silos over and over and over again. >> Matt, the reason why we're talking about this is interesting, 'cause you know what this points out, in my opinion, it's my opinion. This points out that we're talking about content as a word means that you guys were on the cutting edge of new paradigms, which is content, it's essentially code, but it's addressable, community it's being shared. Someone wrote the code and it's a whole 'nother level of thinking. This is kind of a platform automation. I get it. So give us your thoughts because this is a critical component because the origination of the content, the code, I mean, I love it. Content is, I've always said content, our content should be code. It's all data, but this is interesting. This is the cutting edge concept. Could you explain what it means from your perspective? >> This is about building communities around that content, right? Like it's that sharing that didn't exist before, like Robyn mentioned, like, you know, you shouldn't have to build the same thing a dozen times or 100 times, you should be able to leverage the capabilities of experts and people who understand that section of automation the best, like I might be an expert in one field or Robyn's an expert in another field, we're automating in the same space. We should be able to bring our own expertise and resources together. And so this is what that content is. Like, I'm an expert in one, you're an expert in another, let's bring them together as part of our automation community and share them so that we can use them iterate on them and build on them and just constantly make them better. >> And the concepts are consumption, there's consumption of the content. There's the collaboration of the content. There's the sharing, all this, and there's reputation, there's expertise. I mean, it's a multi sided marketplace here, isn't it? >> Yeah. I read a article, I don't know, a year or two ago that said, we've always evolved in the technology industry around, if you have access to this, first it was the mainframes. Then it was, whatever, personal computers, the cloud, now it's containers, all of this, but, once everybody buys that mainframe or once everybody levels up their skills to whatever the next thing is that you can just buy, there's not much left that actually can help you to differentiate from your competitors, other than your ability to actually leverage all of those tools. And if you can actually have better collaboration, I think than other folks, then that is one of those points that actually will get you ahead in your digital transformation curve. >> I've been harping on this for a while. I think that cloud native finally has gone, when I say "mainstream" I mean like on everyone's mind, you look at the container uptake, you're looking at containers. We had IDC on, five to 10% of the enterprises are containerizing. That's huge growth opportunity. The IPO of, say, Snowflake's on Amazon. I mean, how does this happen? That's a company that's went public, It's the most valuable IPO in the history of IPOs on Wall Street. And it's built on Amazon, it has its own cloud. So it's like, I mean, this points to the new value that's being created on top of these new cloud native architectures. So I really think you guys are onto something big here. And I think you're starting to see this, new notions of how things are being rethought and reimagined. So let's keep it, while I've got you guys here real quick, Ansible 2.1 community release. Tell us more about the updates there. >> Oh, 2.10, because, yeah. Oh, that's fine. I know I too have had, I'm like, "Why do we do that?" But it's semantic versioning. So I am more accustomed to this now, it's a slightly different world from when I worked on Fedora. You know, I think the big highlight there is really collections. I mean, it's collections, collections, collections. That is all the work that we did, it's under the hood, over the hood, and really, how we went from being all in one repo to breaking things out. It's a big line for, we're advancing both the tool and also advancing the community's ability to actually collaborate together. And, you know, as folks start to actually use it, it's a big change for them potentially in how they can actually work together in their organizations using Ansible. One of the big things we did focus on was ensuring that their ease of use, that their experience did not change. So if they have existing Ansible stuff that they're running, playbooks, mod roles, et cetera, they should be able to use 2.10 and not see any discernible change. That's all the under the hood. That was a lot of surgery, wasn't it, Matt? Serious amounts of work. >> So Matt, 2.10, does that impact the release piece of it for the developers and the customers out there? What does it change? >> It's a good point. Like at least for the longer term, this means that we can focus on the Ansible core experience. And this is the part that we didn't touch on much before now with the collections pieces that now when we're fixing bugs, when we're iterating and making Ansible as an engine of automation better, we can do that without negatively impacting the automation that people actually use. We could focus on the core experience of actually automating itself. >> Execution environments, let's talk about that. What are they, are they being used in the community today? What do you guys react to that? >> We're actually, we're sort of in the middle of building this right now. Like one of the things that we've struggled with is when you, you need to automate, you need this content that we've talked about before. But beyond that, you have the system that sits underneath the version of Linux, the kernel that you're using, going even further, you need Python dependencies, you need library dependencies. These are hard and complicated things, like in the Ansible Tower space, we have virtual environments, which lets you install those things right alongside the Ansible Tower control plane. This can cause a lot of problems. So execution environments, they take those dependencies, the unit that is the environment that you need to run your automation in, and we're going to containerize it. You were just talking about this from the containerization perspective, right? We're going to build more easily isolated, easy to use distinct units of environments that will let you run your automation. This is great. This lets you, the person who's building the content for your organization, he can develop it and test it and send it through the CI process all the way up through production, it's the exact same environment. You could feel confident that the automation that you're running against the libraries and the models, the version of Ansible that you're using, is the same when you're developing the content as when you're running it in production for your business, for your users, for your customers. >> And that's the Nirvana. This is really where you talk about pushing it to new limits. Real quick, just to kind of end it out here for Ansible 2020, AnsibleFest 2020. Obviously we're now virtual, people aren't there in person, which is really an intimate event. Last year was awesome. Had theCUBE set right there, great event, people were intimate. What's going on for what you guys have for people that obviously we got the videos and got the media content. What's the main theme, Robyn and Matt, and what's going on for resources that might be available for folks who want to learn more, what's going on in the community, can you just take a minute each to talk about some of the exciting things that are going on at the event that they should pay attention to, and obviously, it's asynchronous so they can go anywhere anytime they want, it's the internet. Where can they go to hang out? Is there a hang space? Just give the quick two second commercial, Robyn, we'll start with you. >> All right. Well of course you can catch the keynotes early in the morning. I look forward to everybody's super exciting, highly polite comments. 'Cause I hear there's a couple people coming to this event, at least a few. I know within the event platform itself, there are chat rooms for each track. I myself will be probably hanging out in some of the diversity and inclusion spaces, honestly, and I, this is part of my keynote. You know, one of the great things about AnsibleFest is for me, and I was at the original AnsibleFest that had like 20 people in Boston in 2013. And it happened directly across the street from Red Hat Summit, which is why I was able to just ditch my job and go across the street to my future job, so to speak. We were... Well, I just lost my whole train of thought and ruined everything. Jeez. >> We got that you're going to be in the chat rooms for the diversity and community piece, off platform, is there a Slack? Is there like a site? Anything else? 'Cause you know, when the event's over, they're going to come back and consume on demand, but also the community, is there a Discord? I mean, all kinds of stuff's going on, popping up with these virtual spaces. >> One thing I should highlight is we do have the Ansible Contributor Summit that goes on the day before AnsibleFest and the day after AnsibleFest. Now, normally this is a pretty intimate event with the large outreach that we've gotten with this Fest, which is much bigger than the original one, much, much, much bigger, we've, and signing up for the contributor summit is part of the registration process for AnsibleFest. So we've actually geared our first day of that event to be towards new or aspiring contributors rather than the traditional format that we've had, which is where we have a lot of engineers, and can you remember sit down physically or in a virtual room and really talk about all of the things going on under the hood, which is, you know, can be intimidating for new people. Like "I just wanted to learn about how to contribute, not how to do surgery." So the first day is really geared towards making everything accessible to new people because turns out there's a lot of new people who are very excited about Ansible and we want to make sure that we're giving them the content that they need. >> Think about architects. I mean, SREs are jumping in, Matt, you talked about large scale. You're the chief architect, new blood's coming in. But give us an update on your perspective, what people should pay attention to at the event, after the event, communities they could be involved in, certainly people want to tap into you are an expert and find out what's going on. What's your comment? >> Yeah, you know, we have a whole new session track this year on architects, specifically for SREs and automation architects. We really want to highlight that. We want to give that sort of empowerment to the personas of people who, you know, maybe you're not a developer, maybe you're not, operations or a VP of your company. You're looking at the architecture of automation, how you can make our automation better for you and your organization. Everybody's suffered a lot and struggled with the COVID-19. We're no different, right? We want to show how automation can empower you, empower your organization and your company, just like we've struggled also. And we're excited about the things that we want to deliver in the next six months to a year. We want you to hear about those. We want you to hear about content and collections. We want you to hear about scalability, execution environments, we're really excited about what we're doing. You know, use the tools that we've provided in the AnsibleFest event experience to communicate with us, to talk to us. You can always find us on IRC via email, GitHub. We want people to continue to engage with us, our community, our open source community, to engage with us in the same ways that they have. And now we just want to share the things that we're working on, so that we can all collaborate on it and automate better. >> I'm really glad you said that. I mean, again, people are impacted by COVID-19. I got, it sounds like all channels are open. I got to say of all the communities that are having to work from home and are impacted by digital, developers probably are less impacted. They got more time to gain, they don't have to travel, they could hang out, they're used to some of these tools. So I think I guess the strategy is turn on all the channels and engage in new ways. And that seems to be the message, right? >> Yeah, exactly. >> Alright, Robyn Bergeron, great to see you again, Matt Jones, great to chat with you, chief architect for Ansible Automation Platform and of course, Robyn senior manager for the community team. Thanks so much for joining me today. I appreciate it. >> Thank you so much. >> Okay. It's theCUBE's coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host. We're here in the studio in Palo Alto. We're virtual. This is theCUBE virtual with AnsibleFest virtual. We're not face to face. Thank you for watching. (calm music)

(gentle music) >> Hello from Chicago, Lisa Martin here at AnsibleFest 2022 with John Furrier. John, it's great to be here. The transformation of enterprise and industry through automation. This is not only the 10th anniversary of Ansible, this was the first in-person AnsibleFest since 2019. >> It's awesome, it's awesome, Lisa, and I want to welcome everyone to our live performance here in Chicago. We were remote for two years, 2019 in Atlanta. AnsibleFest, part of Red Hat now, Red Hat part of IBM. So much has happened in the past couple years and I think one of the things that we're going to cover this week here in Chicago, is the evolution of Ansible, where it fits into the new cloud-native ecosystems emerging, and also, kind of, what it means for developers and operators. And we're going to see a lot of that here at AnsibleFest with wall-to-wall coverage, keynote just happened. Very interesting to see, you know, Ansible stayed true to their knitting, as you say, you know. What do they do? No big announcements. Some big community news. But humble. >> Very humble. Very humble, but also very excited. All the keynotes did a great job of addressing that community, and being grateful to the community for, really, the evolution that we see at Ansible and now 10 years later. They were talking a lot about smoothing operations for the developers, democratizing automation across the organization. They talked a little bit about that skills gap. I wanted to get your opinion, 'cause as we know there's, they talked about it from a demand perspective, there's over 300,000 open positions on LinkedIn for Ansible skills. So a lot of opportunity there, a lot of opportunity for them to help democratize automation across organizations. >> Yeah, I mean, I think the big theme last year we heard, "Three things, top three things at AnsibleFest 2021, Animation, Automation, Automation." Again, this year the same theme, "Automate everywhere" is what they're talking about. But I think you're right, there's a cultural shift where the entire cloud ecosystems kind of spun to the doorstep of what Ansible's ecosystem stood for for many years in the decade, which is configuration, running things at scale. That notion is now persistent across all the enterprise. And I think the key takeaway from the keynote, in my opinion, is that configuration and automation around devices and infrastructure stuff is an enterprise architecture now, it's not just a, kind of a corner case, or a specific use case, it's going to be native across the entire enterprise architecture. And that's why we heard a lot of cultural shift conversations. And that is where the people who are running the Ansible stuff, they're going to be the keys to having the keys to the kingdom. And I think you're going to see a lot more of this automation at scale. I love the introduction of ops-as-code, that's a little piggyback off of infrastructure-as-code and infrastructure-as-configuration. They're saying operations now is the new software model and it's like ops dev, not dev ops. So it's really interesting to see how the operator is now a very big important role in the next level of cloud native. And it's really exciting because this is kind of what we've been reporting on theCUBE, for over 12 years. So, watching Ansible grow organically into a powerhouse community is very interesting. To see how they operationalize this, you know, going forward. >> Well the operator's becoming really pivotal catalysts in this next way, that you've been covering for 12 years. You know, if we think about some of the challenges and the barriers to adopting automation that organizations have had, one of them has been skills, staff rather. The other has been, "Hey, we need to really determine which processes to automate, that's actually going to give us the most ROI, most bang for our buck." They talked a little bit about that today, but that's still something that Ansible is working with its customers and the community to help sort of demystify. >> Yeah and I think that they were front and center around, "You on the room," people in the room, "you make this happen." They're very much, it's not a top-down corporate thing, Ansible staying true to their roots as I mentioned. But the thing about skills gap is interesting, you heard Kaete Piccirilli talking about, "Level Up how your organization automates, push your people, expand your scope." So the theme is, the power is in the hands of this community to essentially be the new enterprise architecture for operations. At the same time that feeds the trend around, we're seeing this accelerated cloud-native developer we're seeing, we're going to be at KubeCon next week, that cloud-native developer, they want to go faster, they want self-service. So you're seeing higher velocity cloud-native development putting pressure on the ops teams to level up, so the theme kind of connects for me. I think Red Hat has got it right here, with Ansible, that the theme is shifting to ops better get their act together, to level up and to the velocity of what the developers are expecting. At the same time, giving them the freedom to be using infrastructure-as-code, infrastructure-as-configuration, and ultimately, ops-as-code. To me, I think this is like the evolution of how infrastructure-as-code, which is the nirvana of DevOps, now is ops-as-code. Which means, if that's true, ops becomes much more invisible, if you will, which is what developers want. >> And we're going to be breaking down ops-as-code today, no doubt, in our conversations with some of the great Ansible community folks and partners and leaders that we have on, as well as tomorrow in our full two days of coverage. You talked about cultural shift, we talk about that a lot John, it's challenging, but one of the things I think that was very palpable this morning, is the power of the Ansible community. Not just those folks that are here with us in Chicago, but all the folks watching virtually online. >> Yeah. >> Truly help drive that cultural shift that is needed for organizations to really be able to streamline cloud ops. >> Yeah and I think Adam Miller who came on, I thought his portion was excellent, around community. He talked about, you know, the 10 years, put a little exclamation point on that. Managing the communications within the community. He actually brought up IRC and Slack and then, "We have Discord." And they introduced a new standard for communications it's called Matrix, which is open-source based. And even in their decision making, their principles around open source stay true. Again, they checked the box there, I thought that was really cool. The other thing that, within the meat of the product, the automation platform, Matt Jones was talking about the scale, the managing at scale, is one thing. But the thing that I think that hit, jumped out at me, was that this trusted automation messaging was really huge. Signing, having signatures, that really hits the supply chain that we've been talking about, and we're going to talk about it next week at KubeCon, the software supply chain is trusting the code. And I think as you have automation, it's a really big part of the new platform. So, I thought that was really the meat on the bone there. >> That was a very strong theme, was the trust this morning. You know, another thing that was important was Walter Bentley, who's coming on, I believe, later today, talked about how organizations really need to think about the value that automation can deliver to the business and then develop an automation strategy, really thinking at it strategically rather than what a lot of folks have done. And they've put automation in sort of in silos and pockets. He's really talking about, how can you actually make it strategic across the organization and make sure that you really fully see and understand and can articulate the value to the business, from a competitive advantage perspective, that it's going to deliver. >> Yeah, and Stefanie Chiras who's coming on too, she mentioned a lot about the multi-cloud, multi-environment layer, how Ansible can sit across all the environments and then still support the cloud-native through what she called "an automation loop". That's going to be really talking to what we're seeing as multi-cloud or super-cloud, next-gen cloud, where Ansible's role of automating isn't just corner case in the enterprise. Again, if it's an enterprise-wide architecture, it will be a centerpiece of multi-cloud, multiple capabilities. Whether that's compatibility services or, you know, stuff running best of breed on different clouds. 'Cause, obviously Amazon was on stage here, they're talking about this, big Ansible supporter. So, we've got Google supporting Ansible, so you got the multiple clouds and even VM-Ware environments. So, Ansible sits across all this. And so, I think the big opportunity that I'm seeing come out of this, is that if Ansible is in this position, this could be a catalyst for them to be the multi-cloud hybrid architecture for configuration and operations, and I think, the edge is going to be a really interesting conversation. We have a lot of guests coming on, I'll talk about that. But, I think running distributed workloads across multiple clouds in multiple environments, that's a killer app and we'll see if they can pull it off. We're going to be drilling everyone on that topic today, so I'm looking forward to it. >> We're going to be dissecting that. I like how you paint that picture of Ansible really as the nucleus of that hybrid cloud strategy. You know, so many organizations are living in a hybrid cloud world for many reasons, but for Ansible to be able to be that catalyst. And question for you, if we think about that, when we talk about multi-cloud strategically or organically or whatnot, where is automation moving in terms of the customer conversation? We know Ansible's really focused on smoothing the developer experience, but where is automation going, in your vision, up the C-suite stack? >> Well, multi-cloud is a C-suite message and they love to hear that, but you talk to anyone who's in the trenches, they hate multi-cloud. It's more complexity and there's a lot of issues around latency. So what you're seeing is, you're starting to see an evolution of more about compatibility and interoperability. And this is kind of classic enterprise abstraction layers when you start getting into these inflection points, as things get better, so it gets sometimes more complex. So I think Ansible's notion of simplicity and ease of use, could be the catalyst for this abstraction layer between clouds. So it's all about reducing the complexities, because at the end of the day, if you want to do something on multiple clouds, whether that's run common services across, that's not making it simpler. You got to, it's going to be harder before it gets easier. So, if that makes any sense. So doing multi-cloud sounds great on paper, but it's really hard and that's why no one's really doing it. So you're going to start to see multi-cloud, what we call super-cloud, which is more capabilities on one cloud. And then having them still differentiate the idea that some standard's going to emerge, is complete fantasy. I think you're going to, we still need more innovation. Amazon does a great job, Microsoft's coming up on number two position as well, the clouds still need to differentiate. But that doesn't change Ansible's position. They can still be that shim layer or bolt-on, to whatever clouds do best. If you run 'em on machine learning on Google, that's cool. You want to use Amazon for this? How do you make those work? That's a hard problem. And, again, that's where automation ends up. >> And with that context, do you think that Ansible has the capability of helping to dial down some of the complexity that's in this hybrid multi-cloud world? >> Yeah, I mean, I think the thing about what's going on great here, that's unique in the history of the computer industry, is open source is so powerful and it continues to power away with growth. So, more code is coming. So, software supply chain is a big issue, we heard that with the trusted thing, but also now, how people buy now is different. You can actually try stuff out on open source and then go to Red Hat, Ansible, and say, "Hey, I'm going to get some support." So there's a lot of community collective intelligence involved in decision making, not just coding, but buyer selection and consumption. So the entire paradigm of purchasing software and using it, has completely changed. So, that puts Ansible in a leading position because they got a great community, and now you've got open source continuing to thrive away. So, if you're a customer, you don't need the big enterprise sales pitch you can just try the code, if you like it, then you go with Ansible. So it's really kind of set up nicely, this cloud market, for companies like Ansible, because they have the community and they got the software, it's open and it is what it is, it's transparent, everything's above board. >> Yeah, you know, you talk about the community, you mentioned Matrix earlier, and one of the things that was also quite resonant during the keynote this morning was the power of collaboration and how incredibly important that is to them, to stay native to their open-source roots, as you you said. But also really go to where the customers are. And they talked about that with respect to Matrix and Discord and that was an interesting, this is the community reaching out to really kind of grow upon itself. >> Well, being someone who's used all those tools, even IRC 'cause I'm old, all the old folks use IRC. Then the, kind of, Gen X'ers use, and the millennials use Slack. Discord, the way they mentioned Discord, it's so true. If you're a gamer, you're younger, you're using Discord. Now, Matrix is new, they're trying to introduce an open source, 'cause remember they don't control Discord and they don't control Slack. So Slack's Salesforce now, and Discord is probably going to try to get bought by Microsoft, but still, it's not open. So Matrix is their open-sourced chat service. And I thought that was interesting and I think, that got my attention, because that went against the principles of users that like Slack. So, it'd be great. I mean if Matrix, if that takes off, then that's going to be a case study of going against-the-grain on the best-of-breed package software like Slack or Discord. But I think the demographic shift is interesting. Discord is for younger generations, let's see how Matrix will do. And the uptake wasn't that big. Only been around for a couple months, we've seen almost 5,000 members. But, you know, not a failure. >> Right. >> But not a home run either. >> Right. Well we'll have to see how that progresses- >> Yeah, we'll see how that plays out. >> as all of the generations in the workforce today try to work together and collaborate. You know, if we think about some of the things that we're going to talk about today and tomorrow, business outcomes, increasing business agility, being able to ensure compliance, with security and regulatory requirements, which are only proliferating, really also helping organizations to optimize those costs and be as competitive as they possibly can. So I'm excited to dissect the announcements that came out today, some of the things that we're going to hear today and tomorrow, and really get a great view of the automation infrastructure marketplace and what's going on. >> Yeah, it's going to be great. Infrastructure-as-code, infrastructure-as-config, operations-as-code, it's all leading to, you know, distributed computing edge. It's hybrid. >> Yep. All right John- >> Yeah. >> looking forward to two days of wall-to-wall CUBE coverage with you, coming to you live from Chicago, at the first AnsibleFest in person, since 2019. Lisa Martin and John Furrier with you here all day today and tomorrow, stick around, our first guest joins us. We're going to dissect ops-as-code, stick around. (gentle music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AnsibleFest, 2020. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back to theCUBE coverage of AnsibleFest 2020 Virtual. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick, my co-host this week. Day two keynote coverage, Jeff. Good to hear all the great commentary, good stuff great to see you. >> Yeah. You too, John. You know it is a great way to start the day too, with Chris Riley and you've interviewed him a ton. I've interviewed him a ton. I don't know how many times he's been on theCUBE but he's, he's such a sharp guy and he's very articulate. And he speaks in really simple analogies. And it's really easy to keep track of what he's talking about and really focusing on the edge, you know, and he even broke down what exactly is the edge. And he said it very simply right, you just moving compute to the location where the data is gathered, as well as words consumed. And he had a great example of, of, you know, an edge device on a railroad track, keep the track of the trains. And how do you manage that? How do you keep track of it? If there's a problem with it, how do you, how do you fix it so that you can use these, these devices out on the edge to, you know, provide the data and the telemetry to avoid things like everyone trying to avoid. Like unplanned maintenance and unplanned downtime or potentially having some little issue that forces you to reroute a bunch of the trains and you can't get out there to fix it for so much time. So, really bringing this intelligence to the EDS and being able to bring that compute there. Still supported by a data center for a lot of stuff but really again, just fundamentally moving compute to the edge, loves this story. >> Yeah, yeah. Chris is a great, great guy, CTO of Red Hat. We've been here many times in theCUBE. Keep alumni tech athlete as we say, but if you think about it, I mean, we go back to OpenStack. When we first started interviewing Chris. And what's interesting, Jeff of this keynote is, 5G and edge was a big part of it. If you look at the rise of the telco cloud, that was Pat Gelsinger at VMworld, just recently. Talked about this telco cloud. And if you look at kind of what's going on, OpenStack was supposedly dead by Amazon. OpenStack really has brought in the whole private cloud or the telco cloud. If you look at where OpenStack has been successful over the years. You get this new rise of the telco cloud. Okay. If you bring that in, again, bring back Pat Gelsinger, his comment around how telco and 5G is a B to B app, not a B to C. Businesses will be leveraging 5G. And that is clearly an IOT use case. The internet of things at the edge is going to be people, devices, everything. Purpose-built to programmable. And so this is a huge positioning shift in the marketplace as companies have to level up and figure out the edge. So, you know, Chris nails it, in my opinion. If you want to innovate, you've got to automate at the edge. This again is a nice tailwind for Red Hat and Ansible because it brings the Ansible automation in, with open shift and all the work that they've been doing over the years. So, it kind of is a coming home if you will, for all the work from OpenStack to open shift, to public hybrid and now multi-cloud and with private cloud aka the telco cloud. So, this is a fundamental change. I think 5G is going to be a real go-bigger-go-home, moment, I think.(chuckles) I'm praying that it's going to be faster, cheaper, smaller for us consumers, but companies got to get on this. And the pandemic has shown that connectivity security is required. And this is only going to put more pressure on the networks. It's just going to be incredible. I think he hit a home-run with the keynote. I'm super glad Red Hat's thinking this way because it really shows what I think the future will be. >> Yeah. Another thing that Chris talked on actually took some notes here. I, I just want to quote from my notes, is he talked about automation, right. A lot of this automation is the theme we hear about, automation all the time. But he had an interesting quote that it's more than a tool but a process, the constant process on and on. That you need to embed automation as a fundamental component or the organization. And I thought that was really interesting, right. We hear this over and over about so many themes, right. It's not, it's not a destination, it's a journey. And to really think about automation, in more of the context of a journey where you can input it in, as many processes as you can. Now, we had a great interview with, you know, Google, way back when talking about trying to get all the the lameness out of everyday jobs, right. To do the automate, the minutia, I think was the quote. So, that people can get on to higher value things. So, I thought it was a really interesting take-tip, to take out of a higher level view of automation and think about applying it in as many places as you possibly can. And it is a journey versus, you know, a one-stop shop. You put it in and move on to your next task. >> Yeah, that's a great point about the organizational impact. Because if you think about and again, he kind of addressed this in the keynote. And it's kind of sprinkled throughout the theme but also we've been reporting on it through theCUBE interviews. Is that it's, it's connecting through that last mile automation at scale. That's a core message we've heard. That's the capabilities of the tech. But the skills gap and the skills to actually address these challenges of the IOT edge with 5G, are being developed. Cybersecurity, space, DevOps, secops. These are skill areas, was not enough people to do the job and there's more automation coming. So you need, again skills gap, so organizations will address that. And finally, trust and security are huge. So you got the, you know, the capabilities, the skillset and trust and security. Because if you got to have these devices, whether they're purpose built or software defined, this truly impacts an organization. Not just by having the speeds and feeds, the trust and security, and then the skills. Who's going to build it? Who's going to implement it? Who's going to manage it? This is all a whole new generation. And this is what's clearly coming out of all the data we're seeing in the market. It's not just the edge it's, it's everything to do with this kind of like last mile, IOT piece. And it's large scale. So, it's not going away. >> Right. And Matt Jones touched about on that a little bit. And he's, in his keynote as well, talking about using automation to build community. And to your point, John, it comes up over and over in all those keynotes is trust, trust, trust, right. You have to trust the people that you're working with so that you can build community. And you know that they're going to do their part of the job, and you can do your part of the job. And the way you build trust is with collaboration, so that you can cross those barriers whether it's interdepartmental, or I think the, one of the lines from the keynotes was, you know, between Dev and networking. He talks about them being locked up, you know, behind special magnetic locks and hard to get to. So, if you can't get to them, you can't collaborate with them, hard to build trust. So really I think it's again, an interesting twist to use automation as a vehicle to build trust. Really important concept. Again, as you said, in, in 2020 as we come to the end of 2020 and into 2021, you know, COVID has changed the dynamic of DevOps and the way DevOps teams work and how they work, and what they measure and how they collaborate. So if you don't have trust that puts you in a real bad spot. >> Well, trust is multiple dimensions. Right. You mentioned the people side but also infrastructure as code. One of the ethos of DevOps is, you got to trust the infrastructure. If you're coding and programming the infrastructure, you got to understand that that infrastructure as code is going to work. And they'll contain the workloads or, or still only about 15% penetrated give or take, IDC says. So, more containerization is going to happen. More infrastructures' code is going to happen. You need trust there. And what we're hearing at the show here is and kind of teased out the keynote is, customers are thinking about the, their infrastructure automation strategy. But open source still matters. And that's where the trust comes in. The automation space in light of other major cloud vendors promoting their own platforms. Cross cloud integration and automation are starting to become key things that people are starting to talk about. Not just AWS public cloud, you've got Azure, Google and other clouds. As customers start thinking about the trust relationship and open source, this has been kind of becoming a big point. So, you know, hope being open is the way to go. That's where open source is. So I think, the trust equation will be very interesting to see how that plays out. Not only on the infrastructure as code, from a resiliency standpoint and scale, but open source when you add the people component and this collections and content, it's going to be very interesting to see how that all plays out. >> Yeah, it's, it's going to be a good show. And the other thing is that it still feels, it still really feels like Ansible, right. It's still really feels like Red Hat. It doesn't feel like the, you know, kind of the IBM acquisition has had a material impact in the way that they go to market, and the way that the community engages and, and just kind of the voice to me. Still sounds pretty consistent. So you know, good for IBM for, you know, taking a great asset and letting it continue to, continue to run. >> Yep. Well, the thing that I'm looking for at going forward, coming out of this event, is the big mega trend on the business model side is everything is a service also called XAAS. We're hearing that from Cisco, VMware, everyone's talking about everything as a service. And it's easier to give a mandate, "Oh, everything is a service. Jeff, go build it out. Everything is a surge." You go, "Okay." The you go, "Okay, how do we make that happen?" It's not trivial. So you have clustering, you have multi clusters, policy governance. All the things under the covers of making everything as a service, you need automation. And I think the conversation will shift from automation, automation, automation to services, services, services. Because to get to anything as a service, you got to have the under, underpinnings, you got to have the data, you got to have the automation. These are critical architectural foundational things. And you can start to hear that from some of the influencers in the industry. Automation is great, but to get to the services as everything is a service, it's kind of work.(chuckles) It's easier to say. It's hard to do. And we'll keep an eye on that. >> All right. Great. Well, John, again, thanks for sharing your thoughts. We will jump into the program and hear from of the great folks at Ansible and some of their fantastic guests for this continuing coverage of theCUBE, at AnsibleFest 2020. Ready, John? >> All right. Let's do it. A lot of great interviews. Stay with us. >> Jeff: Alright. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Welcome. My name is Richard Henshall. I'm a senior manager for product management, for Ansible Automation Platform. Think to yourself, how did you adapt to the changes this year? How was your team forced to adapt? And were you prepared and had you been automating already? Talking for the Ansible team, we're ready to move forward. Now we suspect that sentiment is shared by many of us here. We just had a good lesson in why being able to adapt quickly is so important. The previous ways of working may not always be available to us, and we have to change the way we focus and look at things. And this is why I have such a strong belief in the power that automation can gift us. And if we remind ourselves of what the goal of automation is, and to put it very simply, to perform work with minimal human interaction On one hand, this sounds great, no work. But it can also seem very impersonal. And the reality is automation cannot be achieved without knowledge and experience. Because what needs to be automated is what we learn. So much of what we do is specific to our circumstances, to our business or our own personal backgrounds. So how we approach automation is also important. And that's why this year's message "Automate to connect" is relevant to the times we find ourselves in. As a rhetorical question, and of course, all of these are rhetorical questions. I'm sat in a room at my house, staring at a camera. I would next ask you why we need to connect? And what do we connect for? Do we connect to share knowledge, to learn from others, to work on common goals and objectives? Reality is it should be all of these. Any intent when we connect from our work perspective, needs to be about collaboration. Collaboration is essential when we approach how we deal with change. Because when we talk about change, we often see it explained as people process and technology. But when we're forced to change, the unexpected circumstances, you can't always be prepared. You're not always given the time to plan and prepare the way you'd like. So having a way to connect, to build relationships and to collaborate is more important than ever. Back in the days when I was learning my trade, middleware engineering before the endless video calls, presentations and spreadsheets, the most difficult relationship to improve was between us in engineering and the network team. And it wasn't because of the skills it wasn't because we didn't like each other, at least I'd like to think so. And it wasn't for lack of trying. It's because the network team, they're on a different floor, big security door, magnetic locks, special key cards that you needed to have access for. It was aggressively protected so they couldn't be interfered with. It wasn't this opportunity to build the relationships in the same way that we could when we could go and collaborate with the Linux Windows or storage teams. You couldn't wander off and discuss a problem, just have a chat, they were locked away. Now, maybe they like that and sometimes it's good to be locked away, but it forms a barrier. And it's a barrier to collaboration. And so with this group, collaboration required meetings, it required planning and this made it harder. And when something's hard, it makes it easier not to do it. And additionally, we didn't have a platform to help us. So ask yourself, does that sound familiar to your circumstance? What we needed to connect those relationships and we've seen this time and time again, is that for automation we need a consistent technology foundation to connect. With the foundation encourages simplicity for collaboration foundation to connect the people, process and technology and a foundation to help us build trust in those relationships. If we'd had that foundation, that platform, we could have been successful much faster. 'Cause it's important we understand that success depends on trust between groups. To be successful in adapting to change we need to know we trust when the situation may not be perfect. It might be different offices, could be different countries, probably different languages, maybe even different objectives between these different groups. It might be a global pandemic, which is a phrase I never thought I would say in a keynote, but connecting with your colleagues, collaborating and therefore participating in the work that's done. Working as a wider team, enables you to see a broader perspective. Because how else do we trust? Unless we understand each other. How do we trust what we can create? Who has created it? Is he up to standard? And how do we trust what's running where? And who's been running it that we can scale with the correct control? And how do we trust that we can engage removing friction and complexity. And we can do all these things by being given the opportunity to participate, to be included in the overall process. Ultimately, how do we participate to achieve our goals? And what goals do we choose? Your goals are your business challenges automate what makes both your business and IT successful because participation is key to that process. And the more people you can bring together to connect, the more benefit you can achieve. If we've connected and collaborated, we trust what's being produced because automation can be a selfish act. I, the individual do something to make my job easier, but you should think of automation as a gift of knowledge and experience. How can you automate your job to make your colleagues' lives easier? So as we assume and know that participation enables collaboration, how do we help you to collaborate? Well with Ansible, the language of collaboration. And to collaborate, we need to connect. And for that, we have the Ansible Automation Platform. Everything I've described so far is drawn from our collective experience with customers. When Ansible the tool was released, it started as a way to perform automation in a simpler way. As your needs changed, we added more domains and then your needs changed again. As complexity and scale surfaced, a different set of challenges for us to look after. Not only did you do the automation, you need to do more automation as you achieve some successes. And afterwards you have to manage all that automation. To be successful we have deserved that it's not just what you do, it's how and where you do it. It's not just about the tool. It's about the structure, the framework. A focal point and a user experience in maintaining your automation assets. And this is why we focused all of our product offerings into Ansible Automation Platform, a single offering for enterprise grade automation. We've supported your changes in the past, and we've been working to support your changes for the future, help you adapt and connect. Now, if Ansible is the language of collaboration, collections, Ansible content collections are the building blocks of how you simplify the connection of your trusted technologies. Last year, we launched collections as a way to improve the management of content distributed within the Ansible project and the Ansible products. The teams involved were busy working on making this happen over the last 12 months. Working with our community and partners to migrate over 4000.5 modules. This work including this summer with the Ansible collections, 1.0 release. Last Ansible Fest we unveiled certified platforms with the Ansible certified partner program. End to end support for Ansible content between Red Hat and our trusted partners. We now have over 50 certified platforms focused on curated enterprise technology domains. The platforms that you use and rely upon because connecting these domains is connecting your teams. I'm talking about connecting teams. I'm sure that your planning has started already working on cloud native adoption. Key to that cloud native journey and story are containers. And that brings its own set of changes to the way that we work. And we want to support you as you adapt to these changes. I assume most of you are aware that OpenShift is Red Hat's intuivating container orchestration platform based on Kubernetes. And I'd like to announce the release of certified Ansible content collections of Red Hat OpenShift. Whether it be for augmenting provisioning, customizing cluster nodes, or data operations. Collections gives us the perfect opportunity to deliver these use cases and more. Because we know Red Hat customers have chosen and trust Ansible Automation and OpenShift platforms to drive transformation programs. But the connection between these two platforms and the teams that deliver these has always been very implementation efforts. We know that we need to move away from that implementation effort and move to product integration. The reality of evolving tech is it's never all or nothing. If you're fortunate, you can deploy your cloud native application entirely on OpenShift. But what happens, we need to manage across clusters or access existing infrastructure like networks or databases. We're excited to bridge traditional container and edge through Ansible Automation. Perhaps the only automation and container platform solution that is truly agnostic Ansible just doesn't care whose platform you're running on. The new Ansible resource operator, which we deployed as part of Red Hat advanced cluster management is our answer. We're making the Ansible Automation platform a first class provider inside ACM. To enable call outs to automation assets deployed on the automation platform and to make it easily accessible to container management workflows and connect two industry leading technology platforms. Enabling this integration with our customers to identify and enforce policies, applied governance models consistently across multiple clusters, as a deploy and scale complex applications across hybrid multi cluster environments. In the future, the resource operator will be available for any OpenShift deployed service to integrate to the Ansible Automation Platform. And to find out more about this, be sure to checkout Matt Jones' "Future of Ansible Automation Talk" as well as the ACM breakout sessions. Now, as collections are about connecting technology and product integrations are about connecting process. We still need to think about connecting people. How do we ensure that users can find trusted content? So while many users are happy to get content from Ansible galaxy, we know that many enterprises are far less comfortable with that situation. And certainly not comfortable uploading private developed content themselves. We also know that galaxy isn't the only source of content for you to use. There are other source control, repositories, other locations, perhaps even file shares where you allow your teams to collaborate and connect. With all these different sources it can be hard for your users, your internal communities to connect and trust they're using approved content. So we want to connect teams, help them collaborate, have shared goals and ensure trust in how they automate. We need to fill that gap. And that's why last year we launched the automation hub on cloud@redhat.com. As a trusted source for download downstream certified Ansible content supported as part of ground sports automation platform subscription. And this is where you access the collections for those 50 certified platforms I mentioned earlier. But that was only part one of the plan. So while we can provide a location for trusted content that doesn't bring together content from other sources. Before, I mentioned collections were introduced to help the management of automation content. By adopting collections, you provide a path for automation developers to bring content together in a common location, allow multiple teams to increase their time to value in the automation adoption journeys. But to connect internal communities of practice, we need to provide a focal point for all things related to automation content. And that's why we're pleased to announce that the private version of automation hub will be released to the content and knowledge management component of the Ansible Automation Platform. Your privately hosted location for all your Ansible content, to allow you to curate which content is available from which sources, whether it's from Red Hat, the Ansible community, or develop internally. You now have the control over which content you trust. Finally, this year we launched our third hosted service and no additional cost to platform customers. The automation services catalog. The purpose of this service was to allow you to connect your business users with rules-based governance and a simplified user experience to the automation creator deployed via the platform. We're announcing a tech preview launch with the connected technology security connect to your own prem platform environments. It's based on a technology that's part of our future plans. And again, if you attend Matt Jones' "Future of Ansible Automation Talk", you'll hear more about what we're planning in this area. Because this year has been somewhat challenging, automation and Ansible have become more important to many individuals and organizations. So I could leave you with one set of thoughts to adapt and to change as we face, keep things simple, participate in making automation happen and understand the problems to be solved, but always try and keep it simple. Evolve and scale as you connect your teams, as you would grow and expand your automation, grow and expand the scale you're working at as you move forward. And collaborate to break down the silos and domains that build and build your automation that makes change possible. Whether you're an Ansible expert or someone looking for some way to start, we have sessions we hope will inspire you to make your own changes and sessions that will give you the knowledge of how to adapt for the future. Thank you and happy automating.

>> If you want to innovate, you must automate at the edge. I'm Chris Wright, chief technology officer at Red Hat. And that's what I'm here to talk to you about today. So welcome to day two of AnsibleFest, 2020. Let me start with a question, do you remember 3G when you first experienced mobile data connections? The first time that internet on a mobile device was available to everyone? It took forever to load a page, but it was something entirely different. It was an exciting time. And then came 4G, and suddenly data connections actually became usable. Together with the arrival of smartphones, people were suddenly online all the time. The world around us changed immensely. Fast forward to today, things are changing yet again, 5G is entering the market. And it's in evolution that brings about fundamental change of how connections are made and what will be connected. Now it's not only the people anymore who are online all the time, devices are entering the stage, sensors, industrial robots, cars, maybe even the jacket you're wearing. And with this revolutionary change and telecommunications technology, another trend moves into the picture, the rise of edge computing. And that's what I'll be focusing on today. So what is edge computing exactly? Well, it's all about data. Specifically, moving compute closer to the producers and consumers of data. Let's think about how data was handled in the past. Previously, everything was collected, stored and processed in the core of the data center. Think of server racks, one after the other. This was the typical setup. And it worked as long as the environment was similarly traditional. However, with the new way devices are connected and how they work, we have more and more data created at the edge and processed there immediately. Gathering and processing data takes place close to the application users, and close to the systems generating data. The fact that data is processed where it is created means that the computing itself now moves out to the edge as well. Outside of the traditional data center barriers into the hands of application users. Sometimes, literally into the hands of people. Look at your smartphone next to you, is one good example. Data sources are more distributed. The data is generated by your mobile phone, by your thermostat, by your doorbell, and data distribution isn't just happening at home, it's happening in businesses too. It's at the assembly line, high on top of a cell tower, by a pump deep down in a well, and at the side of a train track, every few miles for thousands of miles. This leads to more distributed computing overall. Platforms are pushed outside the data center. Devices are spread across huge areas in inaccessible locations, and applications run on demand close to the data. Often even the ownership of the devices is with other parties. And data gathering and processing is only partially under our direct control. That is what we mean by edge computing. And why is this even interesting for us, for our customers? To say it with the words of a customer, edge computing will be a fundamental enabling technology within industrial automation. Transitioning how you handle IT from a traditional approach, towards a distributed computing model, like edge computing, isn't necessarily easy. Let's imagine how a typical data center works right now. We own the machines, create the containers, run the workloads and carefully decide what external services we connect to, and where the data flows. This is the management sphere we know and love. Think of your primary OpenShift cluster for example. With edge computing, we don't have this level of ownership, knowledge or control. The servo motors in our assembly line are black boxes controlled only via special APIs. The small devices next to our train tracks, running embedded operating system, which does not run our default system management software. And our doorbell is connected to a cloud, which we do not control at all. Yet we still need to be able to exercise control our business processes suddenly depend on what is happening at the edge. That doesn't mean we throw away our ways of running the data centers, in fact, the opposite is true. Our data centers are the backbone of our operations. In the data center, we still tie everything together and run our core workloads. But with edge computing, we have more to manage. To do so, we have to leave our comfort zones and reach into the unknown. To be successful, we need to get data, tools and processes under management and connect it back to our data center. Let's take train tracks as an example. We're in charge of a huge network. Thousands of miles of tracks zig-zagging across the country. We have small boxes next to the train tracks every few miles, which collect data of the passing trains. Takes care of signaling and so on. The train tracks are extremely rugged devices and they're doing their jobs in the coldest winter nights and the hottest summer days. One challenge in our operation is, if we lose connection to one box, we have to stop all traffic on this track segment, no signal, no traffic. So we reroute all of the traffic passengers, cargo, you name it, via other track segments. And while the track segments now suddenly have unexpected traffic congestion and so on, we have sent a maintenance team to figure out why we lost the signal, do root cause analysis, repair what needs to be fixed and make sure it all works again. Only then, can we reopen the segment. As you can imagine, just bringing a maintenance team out there takes time, finding the root issue and solving it, also takes time. And all the while, traffic is rerouted. This can amount to a lot of money lost. Now imagine these little devices get a new software update and are now able to report not only signals sent across the tracks, but also the signal quality. And with those additional data points, we can get to work. Subsequently, we can see trends. And the device itself can act on these trends. If the signal quality is getting worse over time, the device itself can generate an event, and from this event, we can trigger followup actions. We can get our team out there in time, investigating everything before the track goes down. Of course the question here is, how do you even update the device in the first place? And how do you connect such an event to your maintenance team? There are three things we need to be able to properly tie events and everything together to answer this challenge. First, we need to be able to connect through the last mile. We need to reach out from our comfort zones, down the tracks and talk to a device, running a special embedded OS on a chip architecture we don't have in our data center. And we have thousands of them. We need to manage at the edge in a way suited to its scale. Besides connecting, we need the skills to address our individual challenges of edge computing. While the train track example is a powerful image, your challenge might be different. Your boxes might be next to an assembly line or on a shipping container or a unit under an antenna. Finally, the edge is about the interaction of things. Without our data center or humans in the equation at all. As I mentioned previously, in the end, there is an event generated by the little box. We have to take the event and first increase the signal strength temporarily between this box and the other boxes on either side, to buy us some more time. Then we ask the corporate CMDB for the actual location of that box, put all this information into a ticket, assign the ticket to the maintenance team at high priority to make sure they get out there soon. As you can see, our success here critically depends on our ability to create an environment with the right management skills and technical capabilities that can react decentrally in a secure and trusted way. And how do we do these three things, with automation. Yeah, it might not come as much of a surprise, right? However, there is a catch. Automation as a single technology product, won't cut it. It's tempting to say that an automation product can solve all these problems. Hey, we're at a tech conference, right? But that's not enough. Edge computing is not simple. And the solution to the challenges is, is not simply a tool where we buy three buckets full, and spread it across our data center and devices. Automation must be more than a tool. It must be a process, constantly evolving, iterating on and on. We only have a chance if we embed automation as a fundamental component of an organization, and use it as a central means to reach out to the last mile. And the process must not focus on technology itself, but on people. The people who are in charge of the edge IT as well as the people in charge of the data center IT. Automation can't be a handy tool that is used occasionally, it should become the primary language for all people involved to communicate in. This leads to a cooperation and common ground to further evolve the automation. And at the same time, ensure that the people build and improve the necessary skills. But with the processes and the people aligned, we can shed light on the automation technology itself. We need a tool set that is capable of doing more than automating an island here and a pocket there. We need a platform powerful enough to write the capabilities we need and support the various technologies, devices, and services out at the edge. If we connect these three findings, we come to a conclusion. To automate the edge, we need a cultural change that embraces automation in a new and fundamental way. As a new language, integrating across teams and technology alike. Such a unified automation language, speaks natively with the world out there as well as with our data centers at any scale. And this very same language is spoken by domain experts, by application developers and by us as automation experts, to pave the way for the next iteration of our business. And this language has the building blocks to create new interfaces, tools and capabilities, to integrate with the world out there and translate the events and needs into new actions, being the driving motor of the IT at the edge and evolving it further. And yes, we have this language right here, right now. It is the Ansible language. If we come back to our train track, one more time, this Ansible that can reach out and talk to our thousands of little boxes sitting next to the train tracks. The Ansible language, the domain experts of the boxes can natively work together with the train operations experts and the business intelligence people. Together, they can combine their skills to write workflows in a language they can all understand and where the deep down domain knowledge is encapsulated away. And the Ansible platform offers the APIs and components to react to events in a secure and trusted way. If there's one thing I'd like you to take away from this, it is edge computing is complex enough. But luckily we do have the right language, the right tools, and here with you and awesome community at our fingertips, to build upon it and grow it even further. So let's not worry about the tooling, we have that covered. Instead, let's focus on making that tool great. We need to become able to execute automation anywhere we need. At the edge, in the cloud, in other data centers, in the end, just like serverless functions, the location where the code is actually running, should not matter to us anymore. Let's hear this from someone who is right at the core of the development of Ansible, over to Matt Jones, our automation platform architect.