(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the Seaport in Boston. This is day two of theCUBES's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022 different format this year for Red Hat Summit. You know we are used to the eight to 9,000 people big conferences, but this is definitely and a lot of developers this is definitely a smaller, more intimate, more abbreviated keynotes which I love that new style they've really catering to the virtual audience as well as the physical audience, a lot of good stuff going on last night in the Seaport, which a lot of fun Stephanie Chiras is here is the Senior Vice President of Partner Ecosystem Success at Red Hat. >> Yeah. >> On the move again, Stephanie love to see you. >> yeah. Thank you. It's great to be here with you and now in a little different bit of a role. >> Yeah, I'm happy that we're actually in Boston and we can meet face to face. >> Yes. >> We don't have to get in a plane, but you know we'll be on a lot of planes in the next few months. >> Yeah. >> But look, a new role for you in ecosystems. You are interviewing all the partners, which is very cool. So you get a big observation space as my friend Jeff Jonas would like to say. And so, but I'd like to observe the partner ecosystem in this new era is different. >> It's very different. >> I mean just press release is going back it's really deep engineering and really interesting flywheel approaches. How is the cloud and the hybrid cloud ecosystem and partner ecosystem different today? >> I think there's a couple of things, I think first of all cloud accelerating all the innovation, the whole cloud motion pulls in a cloud partner in addition to many of the other partners that you need to deploy a solution. So this makes almost every deployment a multi-partner deployment. So that creates the need not just for one on one partnerships between companies and vendors but really for a multi-partner experience. Right, how does an ISV work with a distributor work with a cloud vendor? How do you pull all of that together and I think at Red Hat, our view of being a platform company, we want to be able to span that and bring all of those folks together. So I see this transition going from a world of partnerships into a world of a networked ecosystem. And the real benefit is when you can pull together one ecosystem with another ecosystem, build that up and it really becomes an ecosystem of ecosystems. >> Well and I'm a fan, you're a multi tool star, so it may kind of makes you dangerous because you can talk tech in your technical roles. You've been a GM so you understand the business and that's really what it takes in the part of ecosystem. It can't be just technology and just engineering integration, it's got to be a business model associated with that. Talk about those two dimensions. >> And I think what we're seeing in the ecosystem is there are partners that you build with there are partners you service with, there are partners you sell with some do all three, some do two out of three. How do you work those relationships at the end of the day every partner in the ecosystem wants to bring their value to the customer. And their real goal is how do you merge those values together and I think as you know, right, I come from the technology and the product space. I love moving into this space where you look for those value and that synergy of value to bring better technology, a better procurement experience is often really important and simplicity of deployment to customers, but partners span everything we do. We develop with them, we build with them, we deploy with them, we service with them and all has to come together. >> So how do you make this simple for customers? I mean you're describing an increasingly complex environment. How do you simplify this? >> So a couple of things one, spot onto your point Paul, I think customer expectations now are more aggressive than they've ever been that the ecosystem has done pre-work before they show up. The customer doesn't want to be the one who's pulling together this from one vendor, this from another vendor and stitching it together themselves. So there's a number of things I think we've stepped in to try and do digital engagement for certification and deployment, the creation of operators on OpenShift is one way that technology from partners can be done and enabled more easily and quickly with Red Hat platforms. I think in addition, you've seen. >> Can you go a little deeper on that? >> Sure. >> Explain that a little bit more what does that mean? Yeah, First off, we have a digital experience where partners can come in, they can certify and test their applications to run it on Red Hat platforms themselves. So it's a bit of a come one, come all. We also have an engineering team and a developer team to work side by side with them to build those into solutions. We've done things again to supplement that with capabilities of what we call validated patterns things we've done in the market with customers, with partners, we pull together a validated pattern, we put it onto GitHub so anyone can get access to it. It becomes kind of a recipe for deployment that's available for partners to come in and augment on top of that or customers can come in and pull it up GitHub and build off of it. So I feel like there's different layers in the sort of build model that we work with partners and you want to be able to on-ramp any partner wherever they want to influence their value. It could be at the base certification level, it could be even with RHEL 9 was a good one, right. RHEL 9 was the first version of RHEL that we deployed based upon the CentOS Stream model. CentOS Stream is an upstream version of RHEL very tightly tied into the development model but it allowed partners to engage with that code prior to deployment everything from hardware partners to ISV partners, it becomes a much more open way for them to collaborate with us, so there's so much we can do. >> What's the pitch to partners. I mean I know hybrid cloud is fundamental to your value proposition. I mean most people want hybrid cloud even though the cloud guys might not admit it, right, but so what's the pitch, how do you approach partners there's got to be a common theme there pitch me. >> I think one of the things when it comes to the Red Hat ecosystem is the ecosystem itself has to bring value. Yes, we at Red Hat want to bring value, we want to come in and make it easy and simple for you to access our technology when want to make it easy and simple to engage side by side in front of a customer. But at the end of the day the value of the Red Hat ecosystem is not only Red Hat, it's our partnerships with others. It's our partnerships with the hyperscalers, it's our partnerships with ISVs, it's our work in open source communities. So it's not about Red Hat being this sort of epicenter of the ecosystem. The value comes from the collective ecosystem as it stands, and I think we've made a number of changes here at the beginning of the year in order to create a end to end team within Red Hat that does everything from the build to the sell with all the way from end to end. And I think that's bringing a new layer of simplicity for our engagement with their partners, and it's allowing us to stitch together and introduce partners to partners. >> But you are a dot connector in a sense. >> Absolutely. >> And you can't do it all, I mean nobody can. >> Yeah. But especially Red Hat your strategy is not to do it all by design, so where's the big white spaces where you feel as though your strengths need to be complimented by the partners? >> Oh, I think you caught it spot on. We don't think we can do it all, we're a platform company, we know the value of hybrid cloud is all about bringing a flexibility of an ecosystem together. I think the places where we're really doubling down on is simplicity. So the Ansible announcement that we did right with Ansible automation platform on Azure. With that announcement, it brings in certified collections of ecosystem partners on that deployment. We do the work with Azure in order to do that deployment of Ansible automation platform, and then it comes with a set of certified collections that have been done with other partners. And I think those are the pieces where we can really double down on bringing simplicity. Right, so if I look at areas of focus, that's a great space, and I think it is all about connecting the dots, right, it's about connecting our work with Azure with our work with other ISV partners to pull that together and show up to a customer with something that's fast time to value. >> With so many partners to manage, how do you make sure you're not playing favorites. I guess how do you treat all partners equally or do you even try? >> We absolutely try. I think any partnership is a relationship, right, so it is what Red Hat brings to the table, it's also what the partner brings to the table. Our goal is to understand what the value is the partner wants to deliver to the customer. We focus on that and bringing that to the forefront of what we deploy. We absolutely in a hybrid world it's about choice and flexibility. Certainly there are partners and we made some announcements of course, this week, right yesterday and today with some we're continued to deepen our partnerships with those folks who are doubling down with us where their strategy is very well aligned with us. But our goal is to bring a broad ecosystem that offers customers choice. That's what hybrid cloud's all about. >> I remember years ago, your colleague Bob Pitino, I went down and met him in his office and he schooled me, he was awesome and we did a white board on alternative processors. >> Yeah. >> You guys were doing combat duty in the power division at the time. But basically he helped me understand the trend that is absolutely come true which is alternative processors. It's not just about the CPU anymore, it's about all the CPU and GPU and NPU and accelerators and all these other connected parts. You guys obviously are in the middle of that, you've got relationships with ARM, NVIDIA, Intel, we saw on stage today. Explain the importance and the trends that you see of these alternative processors and accelerators and what that means for customers in terms of the applications that they're now going to be able to tap. >> Yeah, so you know I love this topic when it comes. So one of the spaces is edge, right, we talked about edge today. Edge to me is the epitome of kind of a white space and an opportunity where ecosystem is essential. Edge is pulling together unique hardware capabilities from an accelerator all the way out to new network capabilities and then to AI applications. I mean the number of ISVs building AI applications is just expanding. So it's really that top to bottom ecosystem story, and our work with the telco comes in, our work with the ARM partners, the NVIDIA of the world, the accelerators of the world comes in edge. And then you pull it up to the applications as well. And then to touch in, we're seeing edge be deployed a lot in industries and industry verticals, right. A lot of edge deployments are tailored for a retail market or for a financial services sector. Again, for us, we rely very much on the ecosystem to go into industry verticals where platform companies. So our goal is to find those key partners in those industry verticals who speak the speak, talk the language, and we partner with them in order to support them and so this whole edge space pulls all of that together I think even out to the go to market with industry alignment. >> It's interesting to partner, so we're talking about Silicon, we could talk about that all day long. >> Yes. >> And then it spans and that we had Accenture on we had Raj yesterday. And it was interesting 'cause you think Accenture's like deep vertical industry expertise which it is but Raj's role is really cross industry, and then to tap into that industry expertise you guys had an announcement yesterday with those guys and obviously the GSIs are a key player. >> Absolutely. >> We saw a bunch of 'em last night out and about. >> Yeah. >> So talk about the importance of those relationships. >> I think we are in the announcement with Accenture is a great one, right. We're really doubling down because customers are looking to them, they're looking to the Accentures of the world to help them move into this hybrid world. It's not simple, it's not simple to deploy and get that value of the flexibility. So Accenture has built a number of tools in order to help customers on that journey which we talked about yesterday it really is a continuum of how customers adopt for their cloud space. And so us partnering with them offers a platform underneath, give them technology capabilities and Accenture is able to help customers and guide them along that journey and add a new layer of simplicity. So I think the GSI are critical in this space. >> Yeah. >> You talked about the number of companies developing AI, new AI tools right now. And it seems like there's just the pace of innovation is amazing, the number of startups is unprecedented. How do you decide who makes it into your partner system? What bars do they have to jump over to become a Red Hat partner? >> I think our whole partner structure is layered out quite honestly a bit in tiering, depending upon how much the partner is moving forward with Red Hat, how strategically we aligned our et cetera. But there is definitely a tier that is a come one come all, get your technology to work with Red Hat. We do that digitally now in the world of digital it's much easier to do that to give accessibility but there is definitely a tier that is a come one come all and participate. And then above that, it comes into tierings. How deeply do we go to do joint building to do co-creation and how do we sort of partner even on things like we have ARO and ROSA as you know which is OpenShift built with AWS with Azure those provide very deep technical engagements to bring that level of simplicity, but I would say it spans all the layers, right. We do have a dedicated engineering team to work with the ecosystem partners. We have a dedicated digital team to reach out and proactively right, invite folks to participate and encourage them through the thing and through the whole path. And we've done some things on enablement, we just made early March, we made enablement free for all our partners in order to learn more and get more skilled in Red Hat. Skills and skill creation is just critical for partners, and we want to start there right. >> So we started this conversation with how cloud ecosystems are different. And I think AWS as the mother of all ecosystems, so does Microsoft too but they've had it for a while. And I got felt like last decade partners were kind of afraid, all right, we're going to partner with a cloud vendor, but they're going to eat our lunch. I noticed last year at Reinvent that whole dynamic is changing and I think the industry's realizing this is not a zero sum game. That there's just so much opportunity especially when you start thinking about the edge. So you guys use the term hybrid, right, and John and I wrote a piece prior to Reinvent last year, we said there's something new brewing, we've got on-prem connecting to the clouds, it's going across clouds. People call that multi-cloud, but multi-cloud has been like multi-vendor. It really hasn't been a sort of strategy or a technical layer. And now you're talking the edge and we see the hyperscaler spending a hundred billion dollars a year on infrastructure. And now we see companies like yours and your ecosystem building on top of that. They're not afraid of it anymore, they're actually looking at it as a gift and so we coined this term called Supercloud which is a abstraction layer, and it rises above highs all the complexity of the underlying primitives and APIs and people kind of wince at the term Ashesh called it Metacloud which I like it's kind of fun. But do you feel like that's happening in the ecosystem? Is that a real trend or is that just my imagination? >> I think it's definitely a real trend and it's coming from customers, right, that's what customers want. So customers want the ability to choose are they going to self-manage their applications within a public cloud. There's much more than just technology in the public cloud too right. There's a procurement experience that they provide a simplicity of our relationship. They may choose one of the hyperscalers. They pick a procurement experience, they deepen that relationship, they leverage the services. And I think now what you're seeing is customers are demanding it. They want to be a part of that, they want to run on multiple clouds. And now we're looking at cloud services you've seen our strategy double down on cloud services. I think that kind of comes back together to a customer wants simplicity. They expect the ecosystem to work together behind the scenes. That's what capabilities like ARO are or OpenShift on Azure and OpenShift on AWS. That's what we can provide. We have an SRV team, we jointly support it with those partners behind the scenes but as you said, it's no longer that fear, right. We've rolled up our sleeves together specifically because we wanted to show up to the customer as one. >> Yeah, and by the way, it's not just traditional technology vendors, it's insurance companies, it's banks, it's manufacturers who are building out these so-called super clouds. And to have a super cloud, you got to have a super PaaS and OpenShift is the supers of all PaaS So Stephanie cheers, thanks so much for coming back to theCUBE, >> Oh it's my pleasure. it great to see you again. >> Thank you for the time. >> All right, and thank you for watching keep it right there this is day two of Red Hat Summit 2022 from the Seaport in Boston. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Boston, Massachusetts. We're here at the Seaport. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022. My name is Dave Vellante and Paul Gillin is here. He's my cohost for the next day. We are going to dig in to the famous RHEL, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Gunnar Hellekson is here, he's the Vice President and General Manager of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Gunnar, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Thanks for having me. Nice to be here, Dave, Paul. >> RHEL 9 is, wow, nine, Holy cow. It's been a lot of iterations. >> It's the highest version of RHEL we've ever shipped. >> And now we're talking edge. >> Yeah, that's right. >> And so, what's inside, tell us. to keep happy with a new RHEL release. to keep happy with a new RHEL release. The first is the hardware partners, right, because they rely on RHEL to light up all their delicious hardware that they're making, then you got application developers and the ISVs who rely on RHEL to be that kind of stable platform for innovation, and then you've got the operators, the people who are actually using the operating system itself and trying to keep it running every day. So we've got on the, I'll start with the hardware side, So we've got on the, I'll start with the hardware side, which is something, as you know, RHEL success, and I think you talked about this with Matt, just in a few sessions earlier that the success of RHEL is really, hinges on our partnerships with the hardware partners and in this case, we've got, let's see, in RHEL 9 we've got all the usual hardware suspects and we've added, just recently in January, we added support for ARM servers, as general ARM server class hardware. And so that's something customers have been asking for, delighted to be shipping that in RHEL 9. So now ARM is kind of a first-class citizen, right? Alongside x86, PowerZ and all the other usual suspects. And then of course, working with our favorite public cloud providers. So making sure that RHEL 9 is available at AWS and Azure and GCP and all our other cloud friends, right? >> Yeah, you mentioned ARM, we're seeing ARM in the enterprise. We're obviously seeing ARM at the edge. You guys have been working with ARM for a long time. You're working with Intel, you're working with NVIDIA, you've got some announcements this week. Gunnar, how do you keep Linux from becoming Franken OS with all these capabilities? >> This is a great question. First is, the most important thing is to be working closely with, I mean, the whole point of Linux and the reason why Linux works is because you have all these people working together to make the same thing, right? And so fighting that is a bad idea. Working together with everyone, leaning into that collaboration, that's an important part of making it work over time. The other one is having, just like in any good relationship, having healthy boundaries. And so making sure that we're clear about the things that we need to keep stable and the places where we're allowed to innovate and striking the right balance between those two things, that allows us to continue to ship one coherent operating system while still keeping literally thousands of platforms happy. >> So you're not trying to suck in all the full function, you're trying to accommodate that function that the ecosystem is going to develop? >> Yeah, that's right. So the idea is that what we strive for is consistency across all of the infrastructures and then allowing for kind of optimizations and we still let ourselves take advantage of whatever indigenous feature might appear on, such an ARM chip or thus in a such cloud platform. But really, we're trying to deliver a uniform platform experience to the application developers, right? Because they can't be having, like there can't be kind of one version of RHEL over here and another version of RHEL over here, the ecosystem wouldn't work. The whole point of Linux and the whole point of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is to be the same so that everything else can be different. >> And what incentives do you use to keep customers current? >> To keep customers current? Well so the best thing to do I found is to meet customers where they are. So a lot of people think we release RHEL 9 at the same time we have Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, we have Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, all these are running at the same time, and then we also have multiple minor release streams inside those. So at any given time, we're running, let's say, a dozen different versions of RHEL are being maintained and kept up-to-date, and we do this precisely to make sure that we're not force marching people into the new version and they have a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription, they should just be able to sit there and enjoy the minor version that they like. And we try and keep that going for as long as possible. >> Even if it's 10 years out of date? >> So, 10 years, interesting you chose that number because that's the end of life. >> That's the end of the life cycle. >> Right. And so 10 years is about, that's the natural life of a given major release, but again inside that you have several 10-year life cycles kind of cascading on each other, right? So nine is the start of the next 10-year cycle while we're still living inside the 10-year cycle of seven and eight. So lots of options for customers. >> How are you thinking about the edge? how do you define, let's not go to the definition, but at high level. (Gunnar laughing) Like I've been in a conference last week. It was Dell Tech World, I'll just say it. They were sort of the edge to them was the retail store. >> Yeah. >> Lowe's, okay, cool, I guess that's edgy, I guess, But I think space is the edge. (Gunnar chuckling) >> Right, right, right. >> Or a vehicle. How do you think about the edge? All the above or but the exciting stuff to me is that far edge, but I wonder if you can comment. >> Yeah, so there's all kinds of taxonomies out there for the edge. For me, I'm a simple country product manager at heart and so, I try to keep it simple, right? And the way I think about the edge is, here's a use case in which somebody needs a small operating system that deploys on probably a small piece of hardware, usually varying sizes, but it could be pretty small. That thing needs to be updated without any human touching it, right? And it needs to be reliably maintained without any human touching it. Usually in the edge cases, actually touching the hardware is a very expensive proposition. So we're trying to be as hands off as possible. >> No truck rolls. >> No truck rolls ever, right, exactly. (Dave chuckling) And then, now that I've got that stable base, I'm going to go take an application. I'll probably put it in a container for simplicity's sake and same thing, I want to be able to deploy that application. If something goes wrong, I need to build a roll back to a known good state and then I need to set of management tools that allow me to touch things, make sure that everything is healthy, make sure that the updates roll out correctly, maybe do some AB testing, things like that. So I think about that as, that's the, when we talk about the edge case for RHEL, that's the horizontal use case and then we can do specializations inside particular verticals or particular industries, but at bottom that's the use case we're talking about when we talk about the edge. >> And an assumption of connectivity at some point? >> Yeah. >> Right, you didn't have to always be on. >> Intermittent, latent, eventual connectivity. >> Eventual connectivity. (chuckles) That's right in some tech terms. >> Red Hat was originally a one trick pony. I mean, RHEL was it and now you've got all of these other extensions and different markets that you expanded into. What's your role in coordinating what all those different functions are doing? >> Yes, you look at all the innovations we've made, whether it's in storage, whether it's in OpenShift and elsewhere, RHEL remains the beating heart, right? It's the place where everything starts. And so a lot of what my team does is, yes, we're trying to make all the partners happy, we're also trying to make our internal partners happy, right? So the OpenShift folks need stuff out of RHEL, just like any other software vendor. And so I really think about RHEL is yes, we're a platform, yes, we're a product in our own right, but we're also a service organization for all the other parts of the portfolio. And the reason for that is we need to make sure all this stuff works together, right? Part of the whole reasoning behind the Red Hat Portfolio at large is that each of these pieces build on each other and compliment each other, right? I think that's an important part of the Red Hat mission, the RHEL mission. >> There's an article in the journal yesterday about how the tech industry was sort of pounding the drum on H-1B visas, there's a limit. I think it's been the same limit since 2005, 65,000 a year. We are facing, customers are facing, you guys, I'm sure as well, we are, real skills shortage, there's a lack of talent. How are you seeing companies deal with that? What are you advising them? What are you guys doing yourselves? >> Yeah, it's interesting, especially as everybody went through some flavor of digital transformation during the pandemic and now everybody's going through some, and kind of connected to that, everybody's making a move to the public cloud. They're making operating system choices when they're making those platform choices, right? And I think what's interesting is that, what they're coming to is, "Well, I have a Linux skills shortage and for a thousand reasons the market has not provided enough Linux admins." I mean, these are very lucrative positions, right? With command a lot of money, you would expect their supply would eventually catch up, but for whatever reason, it's not catching up. So I can't solve this by throwing bodies at it so I need to figure out a more efficient way of running my Linux operation. People are making a couple choices. The first is they're ensuring that they have consistency in their operating system choices, whether it's on premise or in the cloud, or even out on the edge, if I have to juggle three, four different operating systems, as I'm going through these three or four different infrastructures, that doesn't make any sense, 'cause the one thing is most precious to me is my Linux talent, right? And so I need to make sure that they're consistent, optimized and efficient. The other thing they're doing is tooling and automation and especially through tools like Ansible, right? Being able to take advantage of as much automation as possible and much consistency as possible so that they can make the most of the Linux talent that they do have. And so with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, in particular, you see us make a big investment in things like more automation tools for things like SAP and SQL server deployments, you'll see us make investments in things like basic stuff like the web console, right? We should now be able to go and point and click and go basic Linux administration tasks that lowers the barrier to entry and makes it easier to find people to actually administer the systems that you have. >> As you move out onto these new platforms, particularly on the edge, many of them will be much smaller, limited function. How do you make the decisions about what features you're going to keep or what you're going to keep in RHEL when you're running on a thermostat? >> Okay, so let me be clear, I don't want RHEL to run on a thermostat. (everybody laughing) >> I gave you advantage over it. >> I can't handle the margins on something like that, but at the end. >> You're running on, you're running on the GM. >> Yeah, no that's, right? And so the, so the choice at the, the most important thing we can do is give customers the tools that they need to make the choice that's appropriate for their deployment. I have learned over several years in this business that if I start choosing what content a customer decide wants on their operating system I will always guess it wrong, right? So my job is to make sure that I have a library of reliable, secure software options for them, that they can use as ingredients into their solution. And I give them tools that allow them to kind of curate the operating system that they need. So that's the tool like Image Builder, which we just announced, the image builder service lets a customer go in and point and click and kind of compose the edge operating system they need, hit a button and now they have an atomic image that they can go deploy out on the edge reliably, right? >> Gunnar can you clarify the cadence of releases? >> Oh yeah. >> You guys, the change that you made there. >> Yeah. >> Why that change occurred and what what's the standard today? >> Yeah, so back when we released RHEl 8, so we were just talking about hardware and you know, it's ARM and X86, all these different kinds of hardware, the hardware market is internally. I tell everybody the hardware market just got real weird, right? It's just got, the schedules are crazy. We got so many more entrance. Everything is kind of out of sync from where it used to be, it used to be there was a metronome, right? You mentioned Moore's law earlier. It was like a 18 month metronome. Everybody could kind of set their watch to. >> Right. >> So that's gone, and so now we have so much hardware that we need to reconcile. The only way for us to provide the kind of stability and consistency that customers were looking for was to set a set our own clock. So we said three years for every major release, six months for every minor release and that we will ship a new minor release every six months and a new major release every three years, whether we need it or not. And that has value all by itself. It means that customers can now plan ahead of time and know, okay, in 36 months, the next major release is going to come on. And now that's something I can plan my workload around, that something I can plan a data center migration around, things like that. So the consistency of this and it was a terrifying promise to make three years ago. I am now delighted to announce that we actually made good on it three years later, right? And plan two again, three years from now. >> Is it follow up, is it primarily the processor, optionality and diversity, or as I was talking to an architect, system architect the other day in his premise was that we're moving from a processor centric world to a connect centric world, not just the processor, but the memories, the IO, the controllers, the nics and it's just keeping that system in balance. Does that affect you or is it primarily the processor? >> Oh, it absolutely affects us, yeah. >> How so? >> Yeah, so the operating system is the thing that everyone relies on to hide all that stuff from everybody else, right? And so if we cannot offer that abstraction from all of these hardware choices that people need to make, then we're not doing our job. And so that means we have to encompass all the hardware configurations and all the hardware use cases that we can in order to make an application successful. So if people want to go disaggregate all of their components, we have to let 'em do that. If they want to have a kind of more traditional kind of boxed up OEM experience, they should be able to do that too. So yeah, this is what I mean is because it is RHEL responsibility and our duty to make sure that people are insulated from all this chaos underneath, that is a good chunk of the job, yeah. >> The hardware and the OS used to be inseparable right before (indistinct) Hence the importance of hardware. >> Yeah, that's right. >> I'm curious how your job changes, so you just, every 36 months you roll on a new release, which you did today, you announced a new release. You go back into the workplace two days, how is life different? >> Not at all, so the only constant is change, right? And to be honest, a major release, that's a big event for our release teams. That's a big event for our engineering teams. It's a big event for our product management teams, but all these folks have moved on and like we're now we're already planning. RHEL 9.1 and 9.2 and 8.7 and the rest of the releases. And so it's kind of like brief celebration and then right back to work. >> Okay, don't change so much. >> What can we look forward to? What's the future look like of RHEL, RHEL 10? >> Oh yeah, more bigger, stronger, faster, more optimized for those and such and you get, >> Longer lower, wider. >> Yeah, that's right, yeah, that's right, yeah. >> I am curious about CentOS Stream because there was some controversy around the end of life for CentOS and the move to CentOS Stream. >> Yeah. >> A lot of people including me are not really clear on what stream is and how it differs from CentOS, can you clarify that? >> Absolutely, so when Red Hat Enterprise Linux was first created, this was back in the days of Red Hat Linux, right? And because we couldn't balance the needs of the hobbyist market from the needs of the enterprise market, we split into Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora, okay? So then for 15 years, yeah, about 15 years we had Fedora which is where we took all of our risks. That was kind of our early program where we started integrating new components, new open source projects and all the rest of it. And then eventually we would take that innovation and then feed it into the next version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The trick with that is that the Red Hat Enterprise Linux work that we did was largely internal to Red Hat and wasn't accessible to partners. And we've just spent a lot of time talking about how much we need to be collaborating with partners. They really had, a lot of them had to wait until like the beta came out before they actually knew what was going to be in the box, okay, well that was okay for a while but now that the market is the way that it is, things are moving so quickly. We need a better way to allow partners to work together with us further upstream from the actual product development. So that's why we created CentOS Stream. So CentOS Stream is the place where we kind of host the party and people can watch the next version of Red Hat Enterprise get developed in real time, partners can come in and help, customers can come in and help. And we've been really proud of the fact that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 is the first release that came completely out of CentOS Stream. Another way of putting that is that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 is the first version of RHEL that was actually built, 80, 90% of it was built completely in the open. >> Okay, so that's the new playground. >> Yeah, that's right. >> You took a lot of negative pushback when you made the announcement, is that basically because the CentOS users didn't understand what you were doing? >> No, I think the, the CentOS Linux, when we brought CentOS Linux on, this was one of the things that we wanted to do, is we wanted to create this space where we could start collaborating with people. Here's the lesson we learned. It is very difficult to collaborate when you are downstream of the product you're trying to improve because you've already shipped the product. And so once you're for collaborating downstream, any changes you make have to go all the way up the water slide and before they can head all the way back down. So this was the real pivot that we made was moving that partnership and that collaboration activity from the downstream of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to putting it right in the critical path of Red Hat Enterprise Linux development. >> Great, well, thank you for that Gunnar. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, it's great to, >> Yeah, my pleasure. >> See you and have a great day tomorrow. Thanks, and we look forward to seeing you tomorrow. We start at 9:00 AM. East Coast time. I think the keynotes, we will be here right after that to break that down, Paul Gillin and myself. This is day one for theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022 from Boston. We'll see you tomorrow, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(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)