(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live, from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCube! Covering Red Hat Summit 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back, live here on theCube, as we continue our coverage here of Red Hat Summit, along with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls. It's great to have you here, in one of America's great cities! We're in Boston, Massachusetts, for day one of the three-day conference. And we're now joined with Denise Dumas, who is with Red Hat, and working on the RHEL 8 release that just became, I guess, available today, right? >> Today! >> Huge news! >> Yes! >> I have to first of compliment you on rocking these Red Hat red earrings. And then I look down below you've got the Red Hat sneakers on too, so you are company-branded >> Absolutely. >> up and down, literally, from head-to-toe. >> I'm very proud of the earrings, because some of the support guys made them up on their 3D printer back at the office. >> John: How cool is that? >> I love it. >> Now we had Stefanie Chiras on a little bit earlier, and we were talking about RHEL 8 and all that came with that, and we talked about the deeper dive we're gonna take with you a little bit later on, now we're at that moment. Just first off, in general, how do you feel when something like this finally gets out of the beta stage, gets moved into a much more active space, and now it's available to the marketplace? >> It's like fresh air, right? >> Thrilled. >> Oh, thrilled. Well, you know, and in a way, it's almost an anti-climax, because we're working on 8.1 already, and we're talking about RHEL 9, but this is just such an opportunity to take a moment, especially for so many of the RHEL engineering and QE team who are wandering around the summit, and for us all to just kind of say, (sighs) it's out. It's out, let's see if they like it, I hope they do. But you know, we've been working with so many of the customers and partners through the High Touch Beta Program, 40,000 downloads of the beta, and it has been tremendous feedback. We've been really pleased to see how many people are willing to pick it up and experiment with it, and tell us what they like and what they don't like. >> So Denise, it's always great to hear the customers, but take a second and celebrate that internal work, 'cause so much code, so many engineers, years worth of planning and coding that go into this, so give us a little but of a look behind the curtain, if you would. >> Well, you know so much community as well, right, because, like everything else that Red Hat does, it's totally Open Source. So, many communities feed into Fedora, and Fedora feeds into RHEL, so we took Fedora 28, and pulled it in, and then did a lot more work on it, to try to move it into, this year, we've done the distro differently. There's a core kernel, the noodles, you know, and then there are the application streams. So we've done a lot of work to separate out the two types of package that make up RHEL, so that we can spin the application streams faster. That's where things like developer tools, and language runtimes, databases, the things that are more aimed at developers, where a ten-year life cycle is not a natural for those, right, and yet the core of RHEL, the kernel, you rely on that, we're gonna support it for ten years, but you need your application streams to keep the developers happy. So we tried to make the admin side happy, and the developer side happy. >> All right so, as Vice President of Software Engineering, your team had, certainly, its focuses along this way. >> Denise: Oh, yeah. And dealing with, I guess, the complexities that you were, was there maybe a point in the process where you had an uh-oh moment, or, I'm just curious, because it's not always smooth sailing, right, you run into speed bumps, and some times there're barriers, they're not just bumps, but in terms of what you were trying to enable, and what your vision was to get there, talk about that journey from the engineering side of the equation, and maybe the hiccups you had to deal with along the way. >> So, RHEL 8 has been interesting because in the course of putting the product together, the RHEL organization went through our own digital transformation. So just like our customers have been moving to become more agile, the RHEL engineering team, and our partners in QE, and our partners in support, have worked together to deliver the operating system in a much more agile way. I mean, did you ever think you would hear agile and operating system in the same breath, right, it's like, wow. So that has been an interesting process, and a real set of challenges, because it's meant that people have had to change work habits that have served them well for many, many years. It's a different world. So we've been very fortunate to take people through a lot of changes, they've been very flexible. But there have been some times when it's just been too much too fast, like (gasps), And so it's like, everybody take a deep breath, okay, will do. You know, a couple of weeks, we'll consolidate. It's been a really interesting process. Clearly the kernel, so we've got the 4.18 kernel, and the kernel comes in and we have to understand what the kernel configuration is gonna be. And that can be a lengthy process, because it means you have to understand, when you pull a kernel out of the upstream some of the features are pretty solid, some are maybe less solid. We have to make an educated call about what's ready to go and what's not. So figuring out the kernel configuration can take a while. We do that with our friends in the performance team. And so every inch of the way, we build it, we see how the performance looks, maybe we do some tweaking, change that lock, everything we do goes back upstream, to make the upstream kernel better. So that, as well, has been an interesting process, because there's a lot of change. We're really proud of the performance in RHEL 8, we think that it's a significant improvement in many different areas. We've got the Shack and Larry Show tomorrow, we'll talk all the way through performance, but that's been a big differentiator, I think. >> All right so, Denise, security, absolutely is at top of mind always? >> Denise: Always. >> Some updates in RHEL 8, maybe if you walk us through security and some of the policy changes. >> Yeah, we bake security in, right, we have a secure supply chain, and, talk about difficult things for RHEL 8, right, every package that comes in, we totally refresh everything from upstream. But when they come in, we have to inspect all the crypto, we have to run them through security scans, vulnerability scanners, we've got three different vulnerability scanners that we're using, we run them through penetration testing, so there's a huge amount of work that comes just to inherit all that from the upstream. But in addition to that, we put a lot of work into making sure that, well, our crypto has to be FIP certified, right, which means you've got to meet standards. We also have work that's gone in to make sure that you can enable a security policy consistently across the system, so that no application that you load on can violate your security policy. We've got nftables in there, new firewalling, network-bound disk encryption, that actually, it kind of ties in with a lot of the system management work that we've done. So a thing that I think differentiates RHEL 8 is we put a lot of focus on making it easy to use on day one, and easy to manage day two. It's always been interesting, you know, our customers have been very very technical. They understand how to build their golden images, they understand how to fine-tweak everything. But it's becoming harder and harder to find that level of Linux expertise. I'll vouch for that. And also, once you have those guys, you don't want to waste their time on things that could be automated. And so we've done a lot of work with the management tooling, to make sure that the daily tasks are much easier, that we're integrated better with satellite, we've got Ansible system roles, so if you use Ansible system roles we wanted to make it easy, we wanted to make the operating system easy to configure. So the same work that we do for RHEL 8 itself also goes into Red Hat Enterprise Linux core OS, which will be shipping with OpenShift. So it's a subset of the package set, same kernel. But there it's a very, very focused workload that they're gonna run. So we've been able to do a really opinionated build for RHEL core OS. But for RHEL 8 itself, it's got to be much more general purpose, we've focused on some of our traditional workloads, things like SAP, SAP HANA, SQL Server, so we've done a lot to make sure that those deploy really easily, we've got tuning profiles that help you make sure you've got your system set up to get the right kind of performance. But at the same time, there are lots of other applications out there and we have to do a really good general-purpose operating system. We can be opinionated to some extent, but we have to support much, much wider range. >> Yeah, I mean, Denise, I think back, it's been five years since the last major release. >> Yeah. >> And in the last five years, you know, Red Hat lived a lot of places, but, oh, the diversity of location in today's multi cloud world, with containerization and everything happening there, and from an application standpoint, the machine learning and new modern apps, there's such breadth and depth, seems like in order of magnitude more effort must be needed to support the ecosystem today than it was five years ago. >> Well, it's interesting that you say ecosystem, because you don't play in those places without a tight network of partnerships. So we have lots, of course, hardware partnerships, that's the thing that you think about when you think about the operating system, but we also have lots of partnerships with the software vendors. We've done a lot of work this year with Nvidia, we've supported their one and two systems, right, and we've done a lot to make sure that the workloads are happy. But, increasingly, as ISVs move to containerize their applications, when you containerize you need a user space that you bring along with you, you need your libraries, you need your container runtime. So we've taken a lot of the RHEL user space content, and put it into something that we're calling the Universal Base Image. So, you can rely on that layer of RHEL content when you build your container, put your application into a container. You can rely on that, you can get a stream of updates associated with that, so you can maintain your security, and when you deploy it on top of RHEL, we're with OpenShift, we can actually support it well for you. >> Walk me through the migration process, a little bit, if I'm running 7, and I'm shifting over, and I'm gonna make the move, how does that work? >> Denise: Carefully (laughs). >> Yeah sure, right. (laughs) 'Cause I've got my own concerns, right, I've got-- >> Of course! >> Sure, I've got to think, daily operation, or moment-to-moment operation, I can't afford to have downtime, I've got to make sure it's done in a secure way, I've got to make sure that files aren't corrupted, and things aren't lost, and, so that in itself is a, teeth-gnashing moment I would think, a bit, how do you make that easier for me? >> Yeah, well, especially when you've got 10,000 servers that you need to manage, and you want to start migrating them. You absolutely have to come to tomorrow morning's demo, we're gonna do, it's live! >> It's always tricky, right, live is always, yeah. >> Yeah, but migration, so we've put a lot of effort into migration. We're looking at, it's no good if the applications can't come along, why would you migrate the operating system, you wanna migrate the application. So we've got tooling that examines your environment, and tries to automate as much of it as we can. It looks at your existing environment, it looks at what you're gonna move through, it'll ask a few questions, it's totally driven by plug-in equivalents, we call them actors, and they understand the various, like one understands how to do network configuration, one understands how to replicate your disk configuration. It's integrated with automated backup and rollback, which is a thing that people have wanted for a long time so that we've got a much tighter level of safety there. We won't be able to migrate everything, I'm sure, but, as time goes along we add more and more and more into that utility as we learn more about what matters to customers. >> So, tomorrow morning, live demo. >> Denise: Live demo! >> Get a good night's sleep tonight! >> Denise: Put on your crash helmets! >> Fingers crossed. But thanks for joining us here and talking about the RHEL 8, about the rollout, and we wish you well with that, off to a great start for sure. >> Thank you so much, >> Thank you Denise. >> the RHEL teams are amazing, I love my guys. >> Great, thanks for being with us. >> Denise: Thank you so much. >> We'll continue here at the Red Hat Summit. You're watching theCUBE, live from Boston. (upbeat music)