>> Live from Seattle, Washington, it's the Cube, covering KubeCon and Cloud Native Con North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone. We are live in Seattle for KubeCon 2018, Cloud Native Con. It's the Cube, I'm John Furrier, your host with Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Ashesh Badani, who is the Vice-President and General Manager of Cloud Platforms at Red Hat. Great to see you, welcome back to the Cube. >> Thanks for having me on. Always good to be back. >> So you guys, again, we talk every year with you. It's almost like a check-in. So what's new? You got some big, obviously, the news about the IBM. We don't really want to get into that detail. I know you just a stop on that because it's already out there. But you guys had great success with platformers of service. Now you got the growth of Kubecon and Cloud Native Con, 8000 attendees and users. There's uptake. What's the update on the Red Had side? >> Yeah, we're excited. Excited to be back at Kubecon. It's bigger and better than it's ever been, I think so. That's fantastic. We've been investing in this community for over four years now, since 2014. Really, from the earliest days. Based the entire platform on it. Continue growing that, adding lots of customers across the world. And I think what's really been gratifying for us to see is just the diversity of participants. Both in user perspective as well as the wider ecosystem. So whether you're a storage player, a networking player, management, marketing, what have you. Everything sort of building around this ecosystem. I think we're creating a great amount of value and we're seeing diverse applications being built. >> So you guys have been good then on (mumbles), good timing, a lot of things are going on. This show is an open-source community, right. And that's been a great thing. This is kind of where the end users come from. But two other personas come in that we're seeing participate heavily. The IT pro, the IT expert, and then the classic developer. So you have kind of a melting pot of how this is kind of horizontally connecting. You guys have been successful in the IT side. Where is this impacting the end users?6 How is this open-source movement impacting IT, specifically, and at the end of the day, the developers who are writing code? Have to get more stuff out. What's your thoughts? >> So, we hosted OpenShift Commons yesterday. OpenShift Commons, for the the folks who don't know, is our gathering of participants within the larger OpenShift community. We had lots of end users come and talk about the reason they're adopting a Kubernetes-based platform is to get greater productivity. So for example, if you're someone like Progressive Insurance, an established organization, how do you release applications quicker? How do you make your developers more productive? How do you enable them to have more languages, tools, frameworks at their disposal? To be able to compete in this world where you've got start-ups, you've got other companies trying to compete aggressively with you. I think it's a big dent here, right? It's not just for if you work traditional IT. But it's for if you were a company of all sizes. >> When you talk about customers, every customer is different. You've got, you look at IT, everything is additive, it tends to be a bit of a heterogeneous mess when you get there. Help connect for us what are you hearing from customers? How does, not just Kubernetes, but everything going on here in the Cloud Native environment? How is it helping them? How is it changing the way that they do their business and how's Red Hat involved? >> So one thing we've been noticing is that Hybrid Cloud is here and here to stay. So we've consistently been hearing this from customers. They've invested lots of money and time and energy, skills, in their existing environments. And they want to take advantage of public clouds. But they want to do that with flexibility, with portability, to bring to bear. What we've been trying to do is focus on exactly that. How do we help solve that problem and provide an abstraction. How do you provide primitives. So, for example, we announced our support of Knative, and how we'll make that available as part of OpenShift. Why's that? Well, how can we provide Serverless primitives within the platform so folks can have the flexibility to be able to adopt next-generation technologies. But to be able to do that consistently regardless of where they deploy. >> So, I love that. Talk about meeting the customers there. One of the things that really strikes me, there's so much change going on in the industry. And that's an area that Red Hat has a couple decades of experience. Maybe help explain how Red Hat in bringing some of that enterprise, oversight. Just like they've done for Linux for a long time. >> Yeah, yeah. Stu, you're following us very closely, as are you John, and the team at the Cube. We're trying to embrace that change as it comes upon us. So, I think the last time I was here, I was here with Alex Polvi of Core OS. Red Hat acquired Core OS in January. >> Big deal. >> Yeah, big acquisition for us. And now we're starting to see the fruits of some of that labor. In terms of integrating that technology. Why did we do that? We wanted to get more automation into the platform. So, customers have said, hey, look, I want these clusters to be more self-managing, self-healing. And so we've been really focused on saying how can we take those challenges the customers have, bring that directly into a platform so they're performing more and more like the expectations that they have in the public cloud, but in these diverse, introgenous, environments. >> That speaks to the operating model of cloud. You guys have a wholistic view because you're Red Hat. You got a lot of customers. You have the Dev House model, you got the Kubernetes container orchestration, micro-services. How does that all connect together for the customer? I mean, is it Turn Key and Open Shift? You guys had that nice bet with Core OS, pays big, huge dividends. What are some of those fruits in the operating model? So the customer has to think about the systems. It's a systems model, it's an operating system, so-to-speak. But they still got to develop and build apps. So you got to have a systems-wholistic view and be able to deliver the value. Where does it all connect? What's your explanation? >> So distributed systems are complex. And we're at the point where no individual can keep track of the hundreds, the thousands, the hundred-thousand containers that are running. So, the only way, then, to do it is to be able to say, how can the system be smart? So, at the Commons yesterday we had sort of a tongue-in-cheek slide that said, the factory of the future will only have two employees, a man and a dog. The man's there to feed the dog, and the dog's in place to ensure the man doesn't go off and actually touch the equipment. And the point really being, how can we bring technology that can bring that to bare. So, one example of that is actually through our Core OS acquisition. The Core OS team was working on a technology called, operators. Which is to say, how can we take the human knowledge that exists. To take complex software that's built by third parties and bring that natively into the platform and then have the platform go and manage them on behalf of the actual customer itself. Now we've got over 60 companies building operators. And we've, in fact, taken entire open-shift platforms, put operators to work. So it's completely automated and self-managed. >> The trend of hybrid is hot. You mentioned it's here to stay. We would argue that it's going to be a gateway to multi-cloud. And as you look at the stacks that are developing and the choices, the old concept of a stack-- and Chris was on earlier, the CTO of CNCF. And I kind of agree with him. The old notion of stack is changing because if you've got a horizontal, scale-able cloud framework, you got specialty with machine learning at the top, you got a whole new type of stack model. But, multi-cloud is what the customers want choice for. Red Hat's been around long enough to know what the multi-vendor word was years ago. Multi-vendor choice, multi-cloud choice. Similar paradigms happening now. Modern version of multi-vendor is multi-cloud. How do you guys see the multi-cloud evolution? >> So we keep investing and helping to make that a reality. So, last week, we made some announcements around Open Shift dedicators. Open Shift dedicators is the Open Shift manage service, or AWS. Open Shift is available in ways where it can be self-managed directly by customers in a variety of environments. Directly run around any public cloud or open stack, or what you'd like environment. We have third-party partners. For example, DXC D-systems providing managed versions of Open Shift. And then you can have Red Hat managed Open Shift for you. For example, on AWS, or coming next year, with Microsoft. Through our partnership for Open Shift on Azure. So you as a customer now have, I think, more choice than you ever had before. In terms of adopting Dev-Ops or dealings with micro-services. But then having flexibility with regard to taking advantage of tools, services, that are coming from, pretty much, every corner of IT industry. >> You guys have a huge install base. You've been servicing customers for many, many years, decades. Highest level support. Take us through what a customer, a traditional Red Hat customer that might not be fully embracing the cloud in the past, now is on-boarding to the cloud. What's the playbook? What do you guys offer them? How do you engage with them? What's the playbook? Is it, just buy Open Shift? Is there a series of-- how do you guys bring that Red Hat core Lenux customer that's been on Prim. Maybe a little bit out of shadow IT in the cloud, saying, hey, we're doing additional transformation. What's the playbook? >> So, great question, John. So, first fall into the transformation might be an over-hyped term. Might be a peak hype at this point in time. But I think that the bigger point from my perspective is how do you move more dollars, more euros, more spend towards innovation. That's what every company is sort of trying to do. So, our focus is, how can we build on the investments that they've made? At this point in time, (mumbles) Lenux probably has 50,000 customers. So, pretty much, every customer, any size, around the world, is some kind of Lenux user. How can we then say, how can we now provide you a platform to have greater agility and be able to develop these services quicker? But, at the same time, not forget the things that enterprises care about. So, last week we had our first big security issue released on Kubernetes. The privilege escalation flaw. And so, obviously, we participate in the community. We had a bunch of folks, along with others addressing that, and then we rolled our patches. Our patch roll-out went back all the way to version 3.2, 3.2 shipped in early 2016. Now, the one hand you say, hey, everyone has Dev-Ops, why do you need to have a patch for something that's from 2016? That's because customers still aren't moving as quickly as we'd like. So, I just want to temper, there's an enthusiasm with regard to, everyone's quick, everything's lightning fast. At the same time, we often find-- and so, going back to your question, we often find some enterprises will just take a little bit longer, in reality to kind of get-- (both speaking at once) >> Work loads, they're not going to be moving overnight. >> That's right. >> So there's some legacy from those workloads. >> Right, right. And so, what we want to do is ensure, for example, the platform. So we talked about the security and lifecycle. But, is supporting these Cloud Native, next generation, stateless applications, but also established legacy stateful applications all on the same platform. And so the work we're doing is ensure we don't-- you know, it's like, leave no application behind. So, either the work that we'll do, for example, with Red Hat Innovation Labs. We help sort of move that forward. Or with GSIs, global integrated, real integrators to bring those to bare. >> Ashesh, wonder if we could drill a little bit. There's a lot of re-training that needs to happen. I've been reading lots on there. It's not, oh, I bring in this new Cloud Native team that's just going to totally re-vamp it and take my old admins and fire them all. That's not the reality. There's not enough training people to do all of this wonderful stuff. We see how many people are at this show. Explain what Red Hat's doing. Some of the training maturation, education paths. >> So we do a lot of work on the just core training aspect, learning services, get folks up to speed. There's work that happens, for example, in CNCF. But we do the same thing around certifications, around administering the systems, developing applications, and so on. So that's one aspect that needs to be learned. But then there's another aspect with regard to how do we get the actual platform, itself, to be smart enough to do things, that in the past, individual people had to do? So, for example, if we were to sort of play out the operator vision fully and through execution. In the past, perhaps you needed several database admins. But, if you had operators built for databases, which, for example couch, base, and mongo, and others, have built out. You can now run those within the platform and then that goes and manages on behalf. Now you don't need as many database admins, you free those people up now to build actual business innovation value. So, I think what we're trying to do is increasingly think about how we sort of, if you will, move value up the stack to free up resources to kind of work on building the next generation of services. And I think that's our business transformation work. >> And I think, even though digital transformation is totally over-hyped, which I agree, it actually is really relevant. Because I think the cloud wave, right now, has been certainly validated. But what's recognized is that, people have to re-imagine how they do their infrastructure. And IT is programmable. You're seeing the network. The holy trinity of IT is storage, networking, and compute. So, when you start thinking about that in a way that's cloud-based, it's going to require them to, I don't want to say re-platform, but really move to an operating-environment that's different, that they used to have. And I think that is real. We're seeing evidence of that. With that in mind, what's next? What do you guys got on the horizon? What's the momentum here? What's the most important story that you guys are telling here at Red Hat? And what's around the corner? >> Yeah, so obviously, I talked about a few announcements that we made right around Open Shift Dedicated and the upgrades around that. And things like, for example, supporting bring-your-own-cloud. So, if you got your own Amazon security credentials, we help support that. And manage that on your behalf, as well. We've talked this week about our support native, trying to introduce more server-less technologies into Open Shift. We announced the contribution of SCD to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. So, continuing re-affirming our commitment to the community I think looking ahead, going forward, our focus next year will be on Open Shift four, which will be the next release of the platform. And there, it's all about how do we give you a much better install than upgrade experience than you've had before? How do we give you these clusters that you can deploy in multiple different environments and manage that better for you? How do we introduce operators to bring more and more automation to the platform? So, for the next few months our focus is on creating greater automation in the platform and then enabling more and more services to be able to run on that. >> Pretty exciting for you guys riding the wave, the cloud wave. Pretty dynamic. A lot of action. You've guys have had great success, congratulations. >> Thank you very much. >> You're fun to watch. The Cube coverage here. We're in Seattle for KubeCon 2018 and Cloud Native Con. I'm John your host. Stay with us for more coverage of day one of three days of coverage after this short break. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)