(ambient music) >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBEs' coverage of Red Hat Summit 21 virtual. I'm John Furrier. Host of theCUBE. This year, virtual again, soon to be in real life, Post COVID. As the fall comes into play, we're going to start to see life come back and the digital transformation continue to accelerate. And we've got a great guest, Stefanie Chiras, Senior Vice President and General Manager at Red Hat. CUBE alumni. Great to see you. Stephanie, Thanks for coming on. >> No, it's my pleasure, John. Thanks for having me. I'm thrilled to be here with you and look forward to doing it in person soon. >> I can't wait. A lot of people on their vaccine, some say that by the fall vaccines, where pretty much everyone 12 and over, will be vaccinated but we're going to start to see the onboarding of real life again but never going to be the same. Digital business, at the speed of online, offline, almost redefined and re-imagine. Not the old, offline, online paradigms. You're starting to see that come together. That's the focus. That's the top story in the technology industry. That really brings together the topic that I'd like to talk to you about, which is edge computing and RHEL and Linux. This is the topic where all the action is. Obviously hybrid operating models have been pretty much agreed upon by the industry. That is the way it is. Multicloud is on the horizon but edge part of the distributed system. This is where the action is. A natural extension to the open hybrid cloud which you guys have been pioneering. Take me through your thoughts on this edge computing dynamic with RHEL. >> Yeah. So as you said, we have been on this open hybrid cloud strategy for eight years or so. Very focused on providing customers choice both in where they run, what they run, how they run their applications. And the beauty of this strategy is the strategy endures because it's able to adapt to new technologies coming in. And as you said, edge is where things are happening now. It's enabling customers to do so many new and different things. You take kind of all of the dynamics that are happening in technology with data being produced everywhere, new even architectures and compute capabilities that can bring compute right out there to the data. You get 5G networks coming in and incredible advances in telco and networking. You pull that out. Now you've created a dynamic where the technology can really make edge a viable place to now extend how open hybrid cloud can reach and deliver value. And, our goal is to bring our platform and our ecosystem to do everything from the core of your data center out to public clouds, multiple public clouds. And now bring that all the way out to the edge. >> You know, we talk about edge, you know, we talk decentralization, distributed computing. These are the paradigms that are getting re-imagined, if you will, and expanded. You guys talk about and you talk about specifically this idea of digital fast economy requires a new kind of infrastructure. Talk about this because this is, you know, some say virtual first, media first, data first, video first, I mean, developer first, everything's like a first thing, but this is...focuses on the new normal. Take us through this new economy. >> It's really about how you focus on being able to deliver digitally with decisions near the data, and to be able to adapt to that. It's thinking about how you take footprints and now your footprint out at the edge becomes a part of that. One of the things that's really exciting about edge is it does have some specific use case requirements. And we're seeing some things come back. Things like, I mean, we've talked in the past about heterogeneous computing and heterogeneous architectures and the possibilities that exist there. Now at the edge we're seeing different architecture show up, which is great to see. Being able to bring a platform that can allow the use of those different architectures out at the edge to deliver value is a great thing. In addition, we're seeing bare-metal come back out at the edge. You can really imagine spaces where out at the edge you have new architectures with bare-metal deployments and you're operating containers that are touching directly onto that bare-metal. It brings a whole new paradigm to how to deliver value but now we can bring the consistency of what Linux and RHEL and OpenShift with containers can bridge across that whole space. >> So heterogeneous computing, distributed computing, multi-vendor, if you kind of weave those keywords together you have to have a supporting operating model that allows for different services, cloud services, network services, application services, work together. This kind of puts an emphasis on a control plane, a software platform that can bring this together. This is the core, if I understand the Red Hat strategy properly, you guys are going right at this point. Is that true? >> Yeah, that's absolutely right. It is. When everything else, you can get value from everything else changing what stays the same to help keep you efficient and consistent across it? And that's where we focus on the platforms. And as open hybrid cloud changes with different optionalities, our focus is to bring that sort of single common control plane that provides consistency. So you can develop once and reuse, but make it adaptable to how you want to leverage that application as a container, as a BM, on bare-metal, out at the edge, on multiple public clouds. It's really about expanding that landscape that open hybrid cloud can touch. And you'll see in other discussions, you know, one of the places we're going into new is in the edge, manage services also become part of that paradigm. So, it really is our focus to be that common control plane, provide accessibility while still delivering consistency. And let's face it consistency down at the operating system level, that's what starts to deliver your things like security. And boy, it's a critical topic today, right? To make sure that as you expand and distribute and you've got compute running out there with data, security is top of mind. >> I have to ask you, we've been having many conversations in the open source community, Linux foundation, CNCF, KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, and other other communities. And the common thread is... And I want to get your reaction to this statement, the statement is "Edge computing's foundation must be open across the board." Talk about that. What's your reaction to that? And how does that relate to Red Hat and what you guys are doing at the edge and with RHEL. >> I mean, we really believe an open source brings compatibility and standardization that allows innovation to grow. In any new technology, fragmentation causes the death of the new technology. So you...our focus is, it will have to be, I mean, we firmly believe it absolutely has to be built on an open platform that has standards so that the ecosystem, and the ecosystem around edge is complex. You have multiple hardware capabilities, multiple vendors, any edge deployment will be multi-vendor. So how do you pull all of that together in an ecosystem? It is about having that foundation be open and be able to be accessible and built upon by everyone. >> You know, you were talking earlier about the edge in 5G and we just talking about open. This is the future of computing, both consumer and enterprise, whether it's, you know, a factory or a consumer wearing a wearable device or sensors on cameras, on lights and cities and all these things are happening. I want to get your reaction to that because there's a difference between industrial IOT devices and consumer IOT devices. Both have different ramifications. You know, 5G certainly is not so much a consumer as it is also a business technology, as you get the kind of throughputs you're seeing. So, both consumer and industrial enterprise capabilities are emerging. What's your position on that? >> I mean, I think edge is one of those things that it's been hard for people to wrap their head around a bit because what we deal with edge in our own personal lives, whether that be in our connected home or our mobile phone, that's one view of what edge does in one set of value that it does. But from a separate lens edge is everything from how telco is deployed to how data is aggregated in from sensors and how decisions are made. I mean, we're seeing in spaces, whether it be in manufacturing and adding AI onto manufacturing floors, how do you have, you know, in vehicles, I mean, vehicles are becoming sort of mobile software centers now. So, there is a whole shift in edge that is different from industry 4.0 and from kind of operational transformation edge that it's driving all the way into kind of the things that we see everyday which is more the global space and how our homes are connected. And I think now we're starting to see a real maturity in how the world views edge to be able to compartmentalize what enterprise edge is able to do, how edge can change operational technologies, as well as how edge can change kind of our daily lives. >> Great vision and great insights. Definitely awesome. Thought leadership there. I totally agree. I think it's exciting you see confluence of so many awesome technologies and a bright future with the technology platforms and with society open now is defacto everything not just in tech and truth, whether it's journalism or reporting, society and security, again, trust. Open, trust, technology. I got all come in together. The confluence of all those are as going on. So, I think you've got a great read on that. So thanks for sharing. Red Hat Summit. What's new? Tell us what's new here and what's being talked about that no one's heard before and what's the existing stuff that's getting better. >> Yeah, we'd love to. So we are really doubling down on edge within our portfolio. We have, you probably saw in November, we had some announcements, both in OpenShift as well as in RHEL in order to add features and capabilities that deliver specifically for edge use cases. Things like the ability to do updates and roll back in a RHEL deployment. We are continuing to drive things into our products that cater to the needs of edge deployment. As part of that, we are engaged with a whole lot of customers today deploying their edge, and that's across industries, things from telco to energy to transportation. And so, as we look at all of those cases that we've been kind of engaged with and delivering value to customers, we are bringing forward the Red Hat edge brand. It's going to be our collection point to shine a spotlight for how the features and functions in our portfolio can come together and be used to deliver in edge deployments. It'll be our space where we can showcase use cases, where we're seeing success with customers but really to pull together 'cause it is a portfolio story and it's an ecosystem story. How do we pull that together in one spot? And in order to support that here at Summit, we are announcing some really key additions into RHEL 8.4 that really focused on the specific needs of what edge is driving. You'll see things like the ability in RHEL to create streamlined OS image generation. And we can simply manage that into container images. That container magic, right? To be able to repeatably deploy an image, repeatably deployed application out to the edge, that has become a key need in these edge deployments. So we've simplified that so operations teams can really meet the scale of their fleets and deploy it in a super consistent way. We've added capabilities. Image builder, we had brought out already, but we've added capabilities to create customized installation media. It's simplifies for bare-metal deployments. And as I mentioned out at the edge work, it's really small bare-metal deployments where you can bring that container right onto their bare-metal. Can imagine a lot of situations where that brings a lot of value. We introduced in RHEL 8.0 podman as our container engine. And we've added new automatic updates in that. So, again, getting back to security fixes. Simple to ensure that you have the latest security fixes. Application updates and we're continuing to add changes and updates into Universal Base Image. Universal base image is a collection of user space packages that are available to the community, fully redistributable. The goal of those user space packages is to enable developers to be able to create container images with those packages included and then they can redistribute them when they're run on OpenShift or they're run on RHELs. So we can really work through that user space and to that host, matching, and we can stand behind that matching, then we can support it, but it allows for a lot of freedom and flexibility with Universal Based Image to really expand where we can go and help folks kind of create, deploy and develop their applications. We're also moving into, I think, one of the things you see in edge is a real industry slant. We're starting to see edge deployments take on real industry flavors. And so we are engaging in some spots, things like, whether it be from automotive to industrial and operational technology. How do we engage in those industry verticals? How do we engage with the right partners? One of the things that's key that we're looking at, 'cause it is core to what we do, is things like functional safety. And, we're working with a company called Axeda who's a leader in this space for functional safety, for how do we bring that level of security and certification into the RHEL space when it's deployed out there at the edge? So, it's an exciting space, everything from the technology to the partnerships, to how we engage as industry verticals. But this is a... I'm really excited to have the Red Hat... >> I can tell. Super excited. You know, one of the things that's interesting is that the industry trivia as theCUBE has been around for 11 years now. We've been to all of Red Hat events and IBM events for many, many years. But I actually interviewed Arvind, who is now the CEO of IBM, who now owns Red Hat, at Red Hat Summit in San Francisco, like three years ago. And, he had a smile on his face and he just announced the acquisition shortly after 'cause I was hitting him with some cloud native questions. A lot of this stuff about kind of what's hitting today and you just laid it out. RHEL, if I get this right, and of course I'm connecting the dots here in real time, It's an operating system that hits bare-metal, open hybrid cloud, edge, public cloud and across the enterprise. It's an operating system. Okay. So, okay. We know all know that. Okay, you apply that to a cloud operating model, you have some system software. So the question, which by the way is, what's going to power the next gen cloud. I think is what Arvind wants and you guys hope. So the question for you Stephanie is, what applications do you hope to create on top of... and what do you have today that RHEL is powering because if you have great systems software like RHEL, that's enabling applications. I'm assuming that's cloud services, that's new cloud native. Take us through that part of the stack. What's your vision? >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the key things that I would touch on is that it's part of the reason we build our portfolio the way we do, right? We have RHEL of course for your kind of Linux deployments that you described but RHEL CoreOS is part of OpenShift and that consistency delivers into the platform and then both of those can then serve the applications that you need to deploy. And we are really excited to be able to do things like work with the transportation industry, folks like Alstom who do really bring edge capabilities all the way out into the rails of the train systems. They, from high speed trains to metros to monorail, they have built their whole strategy on RHEL and Ansible Automation Platform. It's about the platform, just as you said that operating system, delivering the flexibility to pull the applications on top and those applications could be anything from things that require functional safety, right? Things like in vehicles, as an example, could be anything from artificial intelligence, which goes out into manufacturing. But having that stable platform underneath, whether or not using RHEL or OpenShift, that consistency, it opens up the world to how applications can be deployed on it. But I am super excited about what AI and machine learning out at the edge can do and what being able to bring really hardened security capabilities out to the edge, what that opens up for new technologies and businesses. >> That's super exciting. And I think the edge is a great exclamation point around any debate anyone might've had around what the distributed architecture is going to look like. It's pretty clear now what the landscape is from an enterprise standpoint. And given that, what should people know about the edge? What's the update? What's the modern takeaway now that we're, I mean, obviously COVID has proven that there's a lot of edge applications that kind of were under forecast or accelerated, working at home, dealing with network security, you name it. It's been kind of over-amplified, for sure. But now that COVID is kind of coming, there's light at the end of the tunnel, coming to an end, it's going to be still a hybrid world. I mean, hybrid everything, not just hybrid cloud I mean hybrid everything. So edge now can not be ignored. What should people take away from Red Hat Summit this year? >> Absolutely. I think it's the possibilities that edge can bring. And there are different stages of maturity. Telco, beautiful example of how to deploy edge. In telco, as a market continues to drive the.... kind of pioneer what is done in edge. You see a lot of embedded edge, right? Things that you deploy or your business may deploy that is... you purchase it from a company and it's more embedded as an appliance level. And then there's what the enterprise will do with edge specifically for their businesses. What I think you'll see is a catch-up across all of these spaces, that those three are complimentary, right? You've may consume some of your edge from a partner and a full solution. You may build some of your own edge as you expand your data center and distribute it. And you're made leverage. Of course you'll leverage what's being done by the telcos. So what I think you'll see is a balance in multiple types of edge being deployed and the different values that it can deliver. >> Stefanie, final question for you. And thanks for taking the time. Great conversation and interview here for Red Hat Summit. As the General Manager you're constantly talking to customers. I know that. Personally, you've told me that. Many stories off-camera. But also you have to look inside the organization, run the business, keep an eye on the product roadmap and make sure everything's pumping on all cylinders. What is the customer telling you right now? And what's the common pattern that people are talking about, things that they're looking to do, projects they're funding, and what's the most important story that we should be covering. And what's the most important story people aren't talking about? >> So I think one of the things, I'm really seeing, as you mentioned at the beginning we've been talking about open hybrid cloud for a long time. There was a period of time where hybrid cloud was happening to folks or kind of, it was a bit... some of developers were using it from here. Now, hybrid cloud is intentional. It is very intentional about how customers are strategically taking a view of what they deploy where, how they deploy it and taking a bit advantage of the optionality that hybrid can do. So that's one of the things I'm most excited about. I think the next steps that will happen is a balancing of how do they expand that out into, how do they balance a managed services addition into their hybrid cloud, how do they manage that with also having VMs and a large VM deployment on prem. To me now the biggest thing that is being looked at is how do companies make these decisions in a strategic way that is kind of holistic rather than making point decisions. And I am seeing that transition in the customers I talk to. It's not how do I deal with hybrid cloud, it's how do I make hybrid cloud work for me and really deliver value to me and how do I make those decisions as a company. And honestly that requires kind of what you talked about earlier. It requires within those customers to have the structure, the organizational structure, the communication, the transparency, the openness that you've talked about. That takes a strategy like open hybrid cloud a long way. So it's both the people and the process and the technology coming together. >> You know, Stefanie, we do so many interviews in theCUBE and you've been on so many times, you go back and look back and say, "You know, in that year, 2010, we were talking about this." Chiras, I was talking to a friend and we were just talking about 2015. That was the big conversation of moving to the cloud, you know. Startups are all there. Born in the cloud. So, you know, early generation was all about the startup cloud. They all got that. 2015 was like move to the cloud. This year, the conversation isn't about moving to the cloud is about scale and all those enterprise requirements now that are coming from the hybrid. Now that that's been decided, you starting to see that operating model connect. So it's not so much moving to the cloud, it's I've moved to the cloud and now I got to run some now enterprise grade scale operationally. What's your reaction to that? >> Absolutely. I mean, to me, the, I love the intentionality that I'm seeing now in customers, but when it comes down to it, it's about speed of deploying applications, it's about having the security and the stability in order to deploy that, to give you confidence in order to go out and scale it out. So to me, it is speed, stability and scale. Those three comes together. And how do you pull that together with whole of the choices we have today and the technologies today to deliver value and competitive differentiation. >> Open source is winning and you guys are doing a great job. Stefanie, thank you for coming on and spending so much time chatting here in theCUBE for Red Hat Summit. Thanks for your time. >> Well, my pleasure, John. Good to see you. >> Okay. Great to see you. This is theCUBEs' coverage of Red Hat Summit 21 virtual. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (ambient music)