>> Announcer: TheCube presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2022, theCube's continuous wall to wall coverage, Dave Vellante with John Furrier. Keith Basil is here as the General Manager for the Edge Business Unit at SUSE. Keith, welcome to theCube, man good to see you. >> Great to be here, it's my first time here and I've seen many shows and you guys are the best. >> Thanks you. >> Thank you very much. >> Big fans of SUSE you know, we've had Melissa on several times. >> Yes. >> Let's start with kind of what you guys are doing here at Discover. >> Well, we're here to support our wonderful partner HPE, as you know SUSE's products and services are now being integrated into the GreenLake offering. So that's very exciting for us. >> Yeah. Now tell us about your background. It's quite interesting you've kind of been in the mix in some really cool places. Tell us a little bit about yourself. >> Probably the most relevant was I used to work at Red Hat, I was a Product Manager working in security for OpenStack and OpenShift working with DOD customers in the intelligence community. Left Red Hat to go to Rancher, started out there as VP of Edge Solutions and then transitioned over to VP of Product for all of Rancher. And then obviously we know SUSE acquired Rancher and as of November 1st, of 2020, I think it was. >> Dave: 2020. >> Yeah, yeah time is flying. I came over, I still remained VP of Product for Rancher for Cloud Native Infrastructure. And I was working on the edge strategy for SUSE and about four months ago we internally built three business units, one for the Linux business, one for enterprise container management, basically the Rancher business, and then the newly minted business unit was the Edge business. And I was offered the role to be GM for that business unit and I happily accepted it. >> Very cool. I mean the market dynamics since the 2018 have changed dramatically, IBM bought Red Hat. A lot of customers said, "Hmm let's see what other alternatives are out there." SUSE popped its head up. You know, Melissa's been quite, you know forthcoming about that. And then you acquire Rancher in 2020, IPO in 2021. That kind of gives you another tailwind. So there's a new market when you go from 2018 to 2022, it's a completely changed dynamic. >> Yes and I'm going to answer your question from the Rancher perspective first, because as we were at Rancher, we had experimented with different flavors of the underlying OS underneath Kubernetes or Kubernetes offerings. And we had, as I said, different flavors, we weren't really operating system people for example. And so post-acquisition, you know, one of my internal roles was to bring the two halves of the house together, the philosophies together where you had a cloud native side in the form of Rancher, very progressive leading innovative products with Rancher with K3s for example. And then you had, you know, really strong enterprise roots around compliance and security, secure supply chain with the enterprise grade Linux. And what we found out was SUSE had been building a version of Linux called SLE Micro, and it was perfectly designed for Edge. And so what we've done over that time period since the acquisition is that we've brought those two things together. And now we're using Kubernetes directives and philosophies to manage all the way down to the operating system. And it is a winning strategy for our customers. And we're really excited about that. >> And what does that product look like? Is that a managed service? How are customers consuming that? >> It could be a managed service, it's something that our managed service providers could embrace and offer to their customers. But we have some customers who are very sophisticated who want to do the whole thing themselves. And so they stand up Rancher, you know at a centralized location at cloud GreenLake for example which is why this is very relevant. And then that control plane if you will, manages thousands of downstream clusters that are running K3s at these Edge locations. And so that's what the complete stack looks like. And so when you add the Linux capability to that scenario we can now roll a new operating system, new kernel, CVE updates, build that as an OCI container image registry format, right? Put that into a registry and then have that thing cascade down through all the downstream clusters and up through a rolling window upgrade of the operating system underneath Kubernetes. And it is a tremendous amount of value when you talk to customers that have this massive scale. >> What's the impact of that, just take us through what happens next. Is it faster? Is it more performant? Is it more reliable? Is it processing data at the Edge? What's the impact of the customer? >> Yes, the answer is yes to that. So let's actually talk about one customer that we we highlighted in our keynote, which is Home Depot. So as we know, Kubernetes is on fire, right? It is the technology everybody's after. So by being in demand, the skills needed, the people shortage is real and people are commanding very high, you know, salaries. And so it's hard to attract talent is the bottom line. And so using our software and our solution and our approach it allows people to scale their existing teams to preserve those precious human resources and that human capital. So that now you can take a team of seven people and manage let's say 3000 downstream stores. >> Yeah it's like the old SRE model for DevOps. >> Correct. >> It's not servers they're managing one to many. >> Yes. >> One to many clusters. >> Correct so you've got the cluster, the life cycle of the cluster. You already have the application life cycle with the classic DevOps. And now what we've built and added to the stack is going down one step further, clicking down if you will to managing the life cycle of the operating system. So you have the SUSE enterprise build chain, all the value, the goodness, compliance, security. Again, all of that comes with that build process. And now we're hooking that into a cloud native flow that ends up downstream in our customers. >> So what I'm hearing is your Edge strategy is not some kind of bespoke, "Hey, I'm going after Edge." It connects to the entire value chain. >> Yes, yeah it's a great point. We want to reuse the existing philosophies that are being used today. We don't want to create something net new, cause that's really the point in leverage that we get by having these teams, you know, do these things at scale. Another point I'm going to make here is that we've defined the Edge into three segments. One is the near Edge, which is the realm of the-- >> I was going to ask about this, great. >> The telecommunications companies. So those use cases and profiles look very different. They're almost data center lite, right? So you've had regional locations, central offices where they're standing up gear classic to you machines, right? So things you find from HPE, for example. And then once you get on the other side of the access device right? The cable modem, the router, whatever it is you get into what we call the far Edge. And this is where the majority of the use cases reside. This is where the diversity of use cases presents itself as well. >> Also security challenges. >> Security challenges. Yes and we can talk about that following in a moment. And then finally, if you look at that far Edge as a box, right? Think of it as a layer two domain, a network. Inside that location, on that network you'll have industrial IOT devices. Those devices are too small to run a full blown operating system such as Linux and Kubernetes in the stack but they do have software on them, right? So we need to be able to discover those devices and manage those devices and pull data from those devices and do it in a cloud native way. So that's what we called the tiny Edge. And I stole that name from the folks over at Microsoft. Kate and Edrick are are leading a project upstream called Akri, A-K-R-I, and we are very much heavily involved in Akri because it will discover the industrial IOT devices and plug those into a local Kubernetes cluster running at that location. >> And Home Depot would fit into the near edge is that correct? >> Yes. >> Yeah okay. >> So each Home Depot store, just to bring it home, is a far Edge location and they have over 2,600 of these locations. >> So far Edge? You would put far Edge? >> Keith: Far Edge yes. >> Far edge, okay. >> John: Near edge is like Metro. Think of Metro. >> And Teleco, communication, service providers MSOs, multi-service operators. Those guys are-- >> Near Edge. >> The near edge, yes. >> Don't you think, John's been asking all week about machine learning and AI, in that tiny Edge. We think there's going to be a lot of AI influencing. >> Keith: Oh absolutely. >> Real time. And it actually is going to need some kind of lighter weight you know, platform. How do you fit into that? >> So going on this, like this model I just described if you go back and look at the SUSECON 2022 demo keynote that I did, we actually on stage stood up that exact stack. So we had a single Intel nook running SLE Micro as we mentioned earlier, running K3s and we plugged into that device, a USB camera which was automatically detected and it loaded Akri and gave us a driver to plug it into a container. Now, to answer your question, that is the point in time where we bring in the ML and the AI, the inference and the pattern recognition, because that camera when you showed the SUSE plush doll, it actually recognized it and put a QR code up on the screen. So that's where it all comes together. So we tried to showcase that in a complete demo. >> Last week, I was here in Vegas for an event Amazon and AWS put on called re:Mars, machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. >> Okay. >> Kind of but basically for me was an industrial edge show. Cause The space is the ultimate like glam to edge is like, you're doing stuff in space that's pretty edgy so to speak, pun intended. But the industrial side of the Edge is going to, we think, accelerate with machine learning. >> Keith: Absolutely. >> And with these kinds of new portable I won't say flash compute or just like connected power sources software. The industrial is going to move really fast. We've been kind of in a snails pace at the Edge, in my opinion. What's your reaction to that? Do you think we're going to see a mass acceleration of growth at the Edge industrial, basically physical, the physical world. >> Yes, first I agree with your assessment okay, wholeheartedly, so much so that it's my strategy to go after the tiny Edge space and be a leader in the industrial IOT space from an open source perspective. So yes. So a few things to answer your question we do have K3s in space. We have a customer partner called Hypergiant where they've launched satellites with K3s running in space same model, that's a far Edge location, probably the farthest Edge location we have. >> John: Deep Edge, deep space. >> Here at HPE Discover, we have a business unit called SUSE RGS, Rancher Government Services, which focuses on the US government and DOD and IC, right? So little bit of the world that I used to work in my past career. Brandon Gulla the CTO of of that unit gave a great presentation about what we call the tactical Edge. And so the same technology that we're using on the commercial and the manufacturing side. >> Like the Jedi contract, the tactical military Edge I think. >> Yes so imagine some of these military grade industrial IOT devices in a disconnected environment. The same software stack and technology would apply to that use case as well. >> So basically the tactical Edge is life? We're humans, we're at the Edge? >> Or it's maintenance, right? So maybe it's pulling sensors from aircraft, Humvees, submarines and doing predictive analysis on the maintenance for those items, those assets. >> All these different Edges, they underscore the diversity that you were just talking Keith and we also see a new hardware architecture emerging, a lot of arm based stuff. Just take a look at what Tesla's doing at the tiny Edge. Keith Basil, thanks so much. >> Sure. >> For coming on theCube. >> John: Great to have you. >> Grateful to be here. >> Awesome story. Okay and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier. This is day three of HPE Discover 2022. You're watching theCube, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Austin, Texas, it's The Cube, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017, brought to you by Red Hat, the Linux Foundation, and The Cube's ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone, we are here live in Austin, Texas for KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017. This is The Cube's exclusive coverage, I'm John Furrier, the co-founder, of SilconANGLE Media, analyst here with SilconANGLE Media, next guest, Justin Garrison, co-author of the Cloud Native Infrastructure book. How about us wrap up day one with two days of live coverage, Justin, welcome to The Cube. >> Justin: Yeah, thanks for having me. >> Stu, day one wrap-up, guys what are you seeing? Justin, what's your perspective? >> There are a ton of announcements today, it was kind of crazy. It's amazing being part of the CNCF community and everything, and everything happens in the open, but then there's so much other stuff in the ecosystem that just happens and gets announced. >> I mean, real accelerated growth, if you look at KubeCon, this is the second year doing the event, last year's kind of an inaugural event, the first year before that was just an idea, side break out kind of thing going on, just forming, and then just took off. Obviously containers with DockerCon, and Container Ecosystem, kina floating that boat up. Kubernetes, I mean those tracks are huge, the agenda looks like, it's like a university of geeks here, I mean, this has been ramped up pretty fast. What's your take on that? >> I mean, I was at KubeCon last year, and about a thousand people was a great little environment, and a lot of stuff that was still emerging, and being discovered, and now it's everyone is in the middle of it, and trying to learn as fast as they can to pick up these projects, and see how to actually make this stuff production-ready, and how to actually use it. And not just in the environments that they used to be, they're rewriting all of their environments, it's no longer a here's how I run my app the old way, and a VM statically, it's I you know, we're beyond running containers, and they realize that's not the end goal anymore. >> Justin, when we were talking to you before the segment here, and you're like oh, I've been working on Kubeternes for like two years more and everything, and it's funny in the career. It's like oh, well two years, in some ways it's a long time, in CloudNative time it's a long time, in career wise, it's a rather short time, give us a little bit about what you've been seeing, you know, what's interesting, you mentioned there's a whole lot of announcements, I mean, obviously new projects spinning up, new, new releases, so you know, if you could give us a little bit of a historical view. >> Yeah, I mean from last year, it was really hard to get a cluster. It was something that was really, like you had to know what you were doing to make Kubernetes run, and make it highly available and production-ready. And now, club dividers give you a button, you click it, how big do you want it, how much do you want to auto-scale it, and it's all about the application, and bringing business value to whoever's running it to say, like, my application runs here, and now there's more involved with Istio and these network proxies that give you more resiliency in the claw providers, because people don't run their own infrastructures much anymore, it's all in a cloud, and they don't care about the underlying infrastructure, they care about their apps. >> Yeah, so you tell them about CloudNative infrastructure, so one of the things we're teasing out here is, you know, Kubernetes, all this CloudNative stuff will make it easy to be able to do the application, but you know, infrastructure, it matters. I love Dan Cone's line in the Keynote this morning is you know, it's exciting times for boring infrastructure, so you know, talk about that layer, what's important about infrastructure, and bring us in a little bit, you know, why you wrote the book with Kris Nova, and you know, how that fit. >> Really wanted to write it to help people not make a lot of mistakes to help them kind of level up and get a head start in building the infrastructure in the cloud, cause it's not something that they own anymore, it's not this server that they rack, and they take care of it for years. It's something that comes and goes, it's quick, you know, you have to design for failure and resiliency, and that layer of infrastructure isn't important because you don't run it anymore, but it is important to build a platform on top of that that your applications are still resilient. There's no more scheduled down-times in the cloud, like websites aren't gone, you know, Sundays at midnight. >> Yeah, don't you have to be pretty brave, cause you don't own it anymore, but if something goes wrong, you know, you're the one whose job's on the line. >> You own the failure. >> Justin, talk about the feedback that you might have for the industry. Stu and I were looking at the growth, we certainly love the excitement, but they're still running as fast as they can, they're pedaling as fast as they can, they're trying to introduce all these services. You see some good news here, some new releases coming out, some key services for monitoring, tracing, and whatnot, but what do they need to do better, in your opinion as a practitioner, someone who's out in the trenches, what's the critical analysis, in a good way, constructive criticism, what needs to happen? >> Right, moving forward, I mean there was this, you know, since configuration management, everyone said infrastructure is code, and really we need to level up to be, Kris actually coined this to me in the book, was infrastructure is software. Where it is a piece of software that's running that you declare that has a two-way relationship. It's not get repository that statically defines things, it's a declarative thing that mutates the infrastructure and talks back to the user so that things can auto-scale, and have same defaults and you don't have to do every last little piece of it, but the declarative nature and policy-based roles in all the infrastructure you're building, and everything around your application, and with your application need to be defined and controlled by software and not people anymore. >> But what needs to happen to make that, obviously STN, software-defined data center, we've seen a lot of that go on at the network level's door right now, are they there, what's the progress meter on that? How would you peg the progress of the evolution, making that happen, cause that's really what people want, I mean at the end of the day, that's what Lambda is for Amazon, that's what serverless is, that's what virtual Cubelets are for. >> Yeah, and it's funny, cause you can run Lambda in a very non-CloudNative way, I mean you can have, you know, individual deploying code to Lambda, and not checked in to get anywhere, you can do all those things, you can go against the CloudNative model very easily, and so it's interesting just seeing that evolution as well, of people actually adopting how Netflix has been doing it for a long time. >> Yeah, we should call it SoftwareNative. (laughter) I mean, but this is kind of what we're getting at, I mean, people on the buyer side are looking and saying oh, I get it, I see the new wave coming, I want to get out there, I want to ride this, and they want to kind of vet out whose pretender, who's the player, how should businesses evaluate the pretenders and the players in your mind? >> Moving to the cloud should be, you know, and easy sell. Like people building data centers anymore, you have to have immense scale to really care about those things, and really get any sort of benefit. If you can beat Amazon and Google and Microsoft at the pricing game, then you're still not ahead because you still have all the people managed. They have so many thousands of people that are doing this stuff that you can't keep up. And so, I mean, just adopting one of those clouds, and not worrying about the vendor lock-in. But yes, Kubernetes brings a lot that you can move from cloud to cloud, but really it's about moving to a cloud provider that provides what your application needs, and at the rate of innovation that you need, and if you can match those two things, if you can stay innovation-matched, I mean Amazon is probably going to pull ahead of you, because they're doing this as their job. >> If I hear you correctly, what I'm hearing is that look for people that are players, that are constantly introducing more innovative services? >> If that's what you need, if that's what you need. If you do not need a high rate of innovation, if you have a lot of policy, or a lot of rules and regulations around your industry, then you probably will get lost in Amazon, and they'll move ahead, they'll move too far for you. And so, you need to find what matches for your industry, and your application. >> Justin, 4,000 people here, over 4,000 people here, for those that didn't come, what are they missing, what's exciting you the most, you know, is it the hallway track, is it, you know, some of the special interest groups, you know, what are you excited that you've seen so far, and are looking forward to seeing? >> Really missing out, I just love the community. I mean, every talk is recorded, if you really care, like, go watch them on YouTube, they're great, like every one of these things is fantastic, but engaging with people, meeting face to face, cause a lot of people are online. Like I mean, on Twitter, or on social networks, like thousands of people here, aren't, and you get to meet those people and find out what their struggles are and what they're working on, and then learn from them, either you know, where they're headed, or where they were before. >> I mean, you can meet the people who write the code, and they're going to give you the straight scoop, or tell you they don't know it, it's real authentic. >> Yeah, any things that you're hearing, kind of what's the buzz, what's the pain point, you know, that you're hearing from the community so far? >> A lot of people still aren't in cloud, they're still doing it themselves, standing up a cluster on pram, you know, has struggles, Kubernetes cluster that is. I mean, you can't really adopt some of these patterns, until you have an API that declares all of your infrastructure, and that's still hard for people. And OpenStack was going to bring some of that stuff, and sometimes it did, sometimes it didn't, but really it's about people and processes, and getting those things right, and being able to change the culture of your environment, and for your applications, that's what's important for the business, and that's where you can learn from people face-to-face and actually talk to them, and not just read a blog post about it, and just hear a one-way tell me what you did, I need feedback, and I need this feedback from whoever's doing it to say, well, why did you do that, and that's really important in the community to learn. >> Well, one of the preferential I was looking for, it's one thing to say, you know, some of these CloudNative companies, like, you see in Netflix, you see in Lyft, you know these are companies where, you know, digital is their business. What about, you know, more traditional businesses, you know, are they able to make that change, is it too challenging for them, you know, what are you seeing? >> The people and the culture's the hardest thing to change, it always is. And if they can change the people, the Keynote today, Netflix was talking about the tools influence your culture, and if you can influence your culture positively, and do that intentionally to actually change the people, then absolutely, they totally can pivot and make that change, but again, do they need to? I mean, if there's other government restrictions, or something else that like, they could move too fast and cause other problems for their industry. >> What's a practitioner dream scenario right now out there that you see, cause you made a good point, sometimes you might want to have more services, sometimes you might want to pull back so it kind of depends on the perspective, but generally speaking, CloudNative Kubernetes, offers an opportunity, what's the nirvana, what's the ideal use case for practitioners these days, what's the key things that need to be rolled out or on the table should be taken advantage of? >> You mean as far as technology goes, or? >> Whether it's technology, whether it's mindset, culture, people, personnel, package, ops. >> I mean, if we can change the people mindset of how they do things, how they deploy applications, and how they manage those applications, the technology would fall into place, I believe, because the people would drive towards this way of working, and then they would build those tools just naturally. A lot of times, like with Kubernetes, Google was in that mindset, and so they did that, they had that culture, and now they're trying to share that with everyone else, and then everyone else has to learn from the tool, rather than the people building. >> Did you see the Netflix talk on the Keynote was culture and tech, and I think that's a real good point, because if you think about your other point, if you got a lot of compliance issues, you might not want to go fast, you really want to move fast, or you like a, you know, fast dot com or web services company, you might want to compete on value and services. Know your culture and hire right. >> Know what your benefit is of your application, and what environment it plays in, and then you can, from there, figure out. >> Well that's been a struggle for the DevOps world is they're taking a square and trying to put it in a round hole, you know what I'm saying? >> Everyone want to move fast, but should everyone move fast, I don't know. It depends. >> Yeah, alright Justin, well thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Biggest surprise in this whole Kubernetes movement for you, just in terms of shock factor, or blew you away, did you fall out of your chair, share some color, personal perspective. >> The community is just humongous now. I mean, joining it a couple years ago, it was pretty small, and things were really difficult, and now I play with, you know, clusters in Amazon and Google and Microsoft and just one quick button, I play with it for a few hours and I throw it away, and I got a bill for like four cents, I was like that was amazing, like this would take so long, you know, a couple years ago, and the growth of the community around that, just to be able to say like this is easy now, let's level up what we're doing and working on, and figuring out where the benefit is. >> When we were talking earlier in The Cube, and we've been saying for a couple months, this is going to bring back more time for the developers, to bring craftsmanship back to the development process, bringing artistry and artisan kind of, real software development, not like UX stuff, but like really solution-driven. >> Focus on the business application, where's the application in the business struggle and don't worry about the infrastructure. >> Justin Garrison, co-author of the Cloud Native Infrastructure book, it's on the web, check it out, thanks for coming on The Cube, thanks for sharing your perspective. Day one wrap- up here in Austin Texas for KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching, see you tomorrow for day two coverage. Thanks for watching.