>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to Chicago. The Cube is excited to be live on day two of Ansible Fest, 2022. Lisa Martin and John Fur. You're here having some great conversations, a lot of cube alumni, a lot of wisdom from the Ansible community coming at you on this program this week. You know, John, we've been, we've been hearing stories about the power and the capabilities and the collective wisdom of the Ansible community. You can feel it here. Yeah, there's no doubt about that. It's, Ansible is nothing, as Stephanie Chair said yesterday, if not a community and the significant contributions that it makes over and over again, or it's fuel. >>I mean the power of the community is what drives Ansible is gonna drive the future of, I think, cloud in our next generation modern application environment. And it's collective intelligence. It's a production system at the end of the day. And I think these guys have harnessed it. So it should be a really great segment to talk about all the contributor work that's been done. So I'm looking forward to it. >>We've got two great alumni here to talk about the contributor work, how you can get involved. Please welcome back to the cube. Carol Chen, principal community architect at Red Hat. Adam Miller joins us as well, fresh from the keynote stage senior principal software engineer at Red Hat. Guys, great to have you on the cube. Great to be here. Yeah, thank you. So we, we talked, we enjoyed your keynotes, Adam, and what you were talking about on stage, the Ansible contributor summit. That's, you guys have been doing what, this is the seven you've had seven so far in just a couple of years. >>Well, we had seven virtual contributor summits. >>Seven virtual. This is the first Monday was the first in person in. >>First in person since the pandemic and actually the 15th contributor summit overall >>15th overall. Talk about the contributor summits, what the contributors are able to do and the influence that it's having on Ansible Red Hat and what people are able to do with cloud. At the Edge automation. Yeah. >>So our community contributors have always had ways to influence and contribute to the project. But the contributor Summit is really a place where we can get people together, preferably in the same place so that we can, you know, have a really great dynamic conversations and interactions. But we also want to make sure that we don't leave out people who have been constantly online joining us. So this year we are so happy to be here in Chicago in person. We've had about 60 to 70 here joining us. And at first I thought maybe we'll have one third of the attendees joining online because about 30 to 40 people signed up to join online. But in the end, we have more than 100 per people watching our live stream. So that's more than half of the attendees overall, were joining us online. So that really shows where, you know, the contributors are interested in participating for >>Develop. Right. Yeah, it's been, it's been interesting. It's been since 2019, since the in-person Ansible Fest in Atlanta. Now we're in Chicago, we had the pandemic. Couple interesting observations from our side that I wanna get your reaction to Adam Carol. And that is one Ansible's relevance has grown significantly since then. Just from a cloud growth standpoint, developer open source standpoint, and how people work and collaborate has changed. So your contributor based in your community is getting more powerful in scope, in my opinion. Like in, as they become, have the keys to the kingdom in the, in their respective worlds as it gets bigger and larger. So the personas are changing, the makeup of the community's changing and also how you guys collaborate is changing. Can you share your, what's going on with those two dynamics? Cause I think that power dynamic is, is looking really good. How are you guys handling >>That? Yeah, so I mean, I, I had the opportunity to represent the community on stage yesterday as part of the keynote and talk to this point specifically is one of the things that we've seen is the project has had the opportunity to kind of grow and evolve. There's been certain elements that have had to kind of decompose from a technology perspective. We actually had to kind of break it apart and change the architecture a little bit and move things into what are called Ansible collections, which, you know, folks here are very familiar with No One Love. And we've seen a lot of community work in the form of working groups coalesce around those organically. However, they've done so in kind of different ways. They, they pick tools and collaboration platforms that are popular to their subject matter expertise audience and things like that. So we find ourselves in a place where kind of the, the community itself had more or less segmented naturally in a way. And we needed to find ways to, you know, kind of ke that >>Fragmentation by demographics or by expertise or both as >>A Mostly, mostly expertise. Yeah. And so there was a open source technology called Matrix. It is a open source, standardized, federated messaging platform that we're able to use to start to bridge back some of those communities that have kind of broken off and, and made their their own home elsewhere on the internet. So now we're able to, for example, the right, the docs organization, they had a, a group of people who was very interested in contributing to the Ansible documentation, but they'd already self-organized on Discord. And what was interesting there is the existing team for the Ansible documentation, they were already on internet Relay Chat, also known as irc. And Matrix allowed us to actually bring those two together and bridge that into the other matrix cha chat channels that we had. So now we're able to have people from all over the world in different areas and different platforms, coalesce and, and cross. It's like a festival cross pollinate. Yeah. >>And you're meeting the contributors exactly where they are and where they want to be, where they're comfortable. >>Yes. Yeah, we always say we, we reach out to where they are. So, >>And, and, and much in the way that Ansible has the capability to reach out to things in their own way, Right. And allow that subject matter expertise to, you know, cause the technology has the potential and possibility and capability to talk to anything over any protocol. We're able to do, you know, kind of the same thing with Matrix, allowing us to bridge into any chat platform that it has support for bridging and, and we're able to bring a lot of people >>Together. Yeah. And how's that, how's the feedback been on that so far? >>I, I think it has been very positive. For example, I want to highlight that the technical writers that we have contributing via Discord is actually a group from Nigeria. And Dave also participated in the contributor summit online virtually joining us in, in, you know, on the matrix platform. So that, that bridge that really helps to bring together people from different geographical regions and also different topics and arenas like that. >>So what were some of the outcomes of the contributor summit? The, the first in person in a while, great. That you guys were able to do seven virtually during the pandemic. That's hard. It's hard to get people together. You, there's so much greatness and innovation that comes when we're all together in person that just can't replicate by video. You can do a lot. Right. But talk about some of the outcomes from Monday. What were some of the feedback? What were some of the contributions that you think are really going to impact the community? >>I think for a lot of us, myself included, the fact that we are in person and meeting people face to face, it helps to really build the connections. And when we do talk about contribution, the connection is so important that you understand, well this person a little bit about their background, what they've done for the SPO project and or just generally what, what they're interested in that builds the rapport and connection that helps, you know, further, further collaboration in the future. Because maybe on that day we did not have any, you know, co contributions or anything, but the fact that we had a chance to sit together in the same place to discuss things and share new ideas, roadmaps is really the, the kind of a big step to the future for our community. Yes, >>Yes. And in a lot of ways we often online the project has various elements that are able to function asynchronously. So we work very well globally across many time zones. And now we were able to get a lot of people in the same place at the same time, synchronously in the same time zone. And then we had breakout sessions where the subject matter, you know, working groups were able to kind of go and focus on things that maybe have been taking a little while to discuss in, in that asynchronous form of communication and do it synchronously and, you know, be in the same room and work on things. It's been, it's been fantastic >>Developers there, like they, they take to asynchronous like fish to water. It's not a problem. But I do want to ask if there's any observations that you guys have had now that we're kind of coming out of that one way, but the pandemic, but the world's changed. It's hybrid, hybrid work environment, steady state. So we see that. Any observations on your end on what's new that you observed that people are gravitating to? Is there a pattern of styles is or same old self-governing, or what's new? What do you see that's coming out of the pandemic that might be a norm? >>I I think that even though people are excited to get back in person, there are, things have changed, like you said, and we have to be more aware of, there are people who think that not be in person, it's okay. And that's how they want to do it. And we have to make sure that they, they are included. So we, we did want to make a high priority for online participation in this event. And like I said, even though only 4 30, 40 people signed up to join us online initially, so that it was what we were expecting, but in the end, more than 100 people were watching us and, and joining participation in >>Actually on demand consumption be good too, >>Right? Yeah. So, you know, I think going forward that is probably the trend. And as, as much as we, we love being in person, we, we want this to continue that we, we take care of people who are, has been constantly participating online and contributing you >>Meaning again, meaning folks where they are, but also allowing the, the, those members that want to get together to, to collaborate in person. I can only imagine the innovation that's gonna come even from having part of the back, Right. >>And, and not to continue to harp on the matrix point, but it, it's been very cool because Matrix has the ability to do live video sessions using open source another to open source technology called jy. So we're able to actually use the same place that we normally find ourselves, you know, congregating and collaborating for the project itself in an asynchronous and, you know, somewhat synchronous way to also host these types of things that are, are now hybrid that used to be, you know, all one way or all the other. Yeah. And it's been, it's >>Been incredible. Integration is, the integration is have been fascinating to watch how you guys do that. And also, you know, with q we've been virtual too. It's like, it's like people don't want another microsite, but they want a more of a festival vibe, a hub, right? Like a place to kind of check in and have choice, not get absolutely jammed into a, you know, forum or, you know, or whatever. Hey, if you wanna be on Discord, be on Discord, right? Why >>Not? And we still, you know, we do still have our asynchronous forms of >>Work through >>Our get GitHub. We have our projects, we have our issues, we have our, you know, wiki, we have various elements there that everybody can continue to collaborate on. And it's all been, it's all been very good. >>Speaking of festivals, octoberfest that's going on, not to be confused with Octoberfest, that was last month. Talk about how the Ansible project and the Ansible community is involved in Octoberfest. Give us the dates, Carol. So >>YesTo Fest is a annual thing in October. So October Octoberfest, I think it's organized by Digital Ocean for the past eight or nine years. And it's really a, a way to kind of encourage people to contribute to open source projects. So it's not anal specific, but we as an Ansible project encourage people to take this opportunity to, you know, a lot of them doing their first contributions during this event. And when, when we first announced, we're participating in Octoberfest within the first four days of October, which is over a weekend actually. We've had 24 contributions, it, 24 issues fixed, which is like amazing, like, you know, just the interest and the, the momentum that we had. And so far until I just checked with my teammates this morning that we've had about 35 contributions so far during the month, which is, and I'm sorry, I forgot to mention this is only for Ansible documentation. So yeah, specifically. And, and that's also one thing we want to highlight, that contributions don't just come in code in, you know, kind of software side, but really there's many ways to contribute and documentation is such a, a great way for first time users, first time contributors to get involved. So it's really amazing to see these contributions from all over the world. And also partly thanks to the technical writers in Nigeria kind of promoting and sharing this initiative. And it's just great to see the, the results from that. Can >>You double click on the different ways of contribution? You mentioned a couple documentation being one, code being the other, but what is the breadth of opportunities that the contributors have to contribute to the project? >>Oh, there's, there's so many. So I actually take care more of outreach efforts in the community. So I helped to organize events and meetups from around the world. And now that we're slowly coming out of the pandemic, I've seen more and more in person meetups. I was just talking to someone from Minneapolis, they're trying to get, get people back together again. They have people in Singapore, in Netherlands from pretty much, you know, all corners of the globe wanting to form not just for the Ansible project, but the local kind of connection with the re people in the region, sometimes in their own language, in their local languages to really work together on the project and just, >>You know, you to create a global Yeah. Network, right? I mean it's like Ansible Global. >>Exactly. >>Create local subnets not to get all networking, >>Right? >>Yeah. >>Yeah. One, one quick thing I want to touch on Theto Fest. I think it's a great opportunity for existing contributors to mentor cause many people like to help bring in new contributors and this is kind of a focal point to be able to focus on that. And then to, to the the other point we, you know, it, it's been, it's been extremely powerful to see as we return these sub communities pop up and, and kind of work with themselves, so on different ways to contribute. So code is kind of the one that gets the most attention. I think documentation I think is a unsung hero, highly important, great way. The logistical component, which is invaluable because it allows us to continue with our adoption and evangelization and things like that. So specifically adoption and evangelize. Evangelization is another place that contributors can join and actually spawn a local meetup and then connect in with the existing community and try to, you know, help increase the network, create a new subject. Yeah. >>Yeah. Network affects huge. And I think the thing that you brought up about reuse is, is part of that whole things get documented properly. The leverage that comes out of that just feeds into the system that flywheel. Absolutely. I mean it's, that's how communities are supposed to work, right? Yep. Yes. >>That's what I was just gonna comment on is the flywheel effect that it's clearly present and very palpable. Thank you so much for joining John, me on the program, talking about the contributors summit, the ways of contribution, the impacts that are being made so far, what Octoberfest is already delivering. And we're, we still have about 10 days or so left in October, so there's still more time for contributors to get involved. We thank you so much for your insights and your time. Thank >>You. Thank you so much for having us. >>Our pleasure. For our guests and John Purer, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube Live from Chicago, day two of our coverage of Red Hat Ansible Summit 22. We will see you right n after this short break with our next guest.

>>Good morning live from Chicago. It's the cube on the floor at Ansible Fast 2022. This is day two of our wall to wall coverage. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. John, we're gonna be talking next in the segment with two alumni about what Red Hat and IBM are doing to give Ansible users AI superpowers. As one of our alumni guests said, just off the keynote stage, we're nearing an inflection point in ai. >>The power of AI with Ansible is really gonna be an innovative, I think an inflection point for a long time because Ansible does such great things. This segment's gonna explore that innovation, bringing AI and making people more productive and more importantly, you know, this whole low code, no code, kind of right in the sweet spot of the skills gap. So should be a great segment. >>Great segment. Please welcome back two of our alumni. Perry is here, the Chief scientist, IBM Research and IBM Fellow. And Tom Anderson joins us once again, VP and general manager at Red Hat. Gentlemen, great to have you on the program. We're gonna have you back. >>Thank you for having >>Us and thanks for joining us. Fresh off the keynote stage. Really enjoyed your keynote this morning. Very exciting news. You have a project called Project Wisdom. We're talking about this inflection point in ai. Tell the audience, the viewers, what is Project Wisdom And Wisdom differs from intelligence. How >>I think Project Wisdom is really about, as I said, sort of combining two major forces that are in many ways disrupting and, and really constructing many a aspects of our society, which are software and AI together. Yeah. And I truly believe it's gonna result in a se shift on how not just enterprises, but society carries forefront. And as I said, intelligence is, is, I would argue at least artificial intelligence is more, in some ways mechanical, if I may say it, it's about algorithms, it's about data, it's about compute. Wisdom is all about what is truly important to bring out. It's not just about when you bring out a, a insight, when you bring out a decision to be able to explain that decision as well. It's almost like humans have wisdom. Machines have intelligence and, and it's about project wisdom. That's why we called it wisdom. >>Because it is about being a, a assistant augmenting humans. Just like be there with the humans and, and almost think of it as behave and interact with them as another colleague will versus intelligence, which is, you know, as I said, more mechanical is about data. Computer algorithms crunch together and, and we wanna bring the power of project wisdom and artificial intelligence to developers to, as you said, close the skills gap to be able to really make them more productive and have wisdom for Ansible be their assistant. Yeah. To be able to get things for them that they would find many ways mundane, many ways hard to find and again, be an assistant and augmented, >>You know, you know what's interesting, I want to get into the origin, how it all happened, but interesting IBM research, well known for the deep tech, big engineering. And you guys have been doing this for a long time, so congratulations. But it's interesting here at this event, even on stage here event, you're starting to see the automation come in. So the question comes up, scale. So what happens, IBM buys Red Hat, you go raid the, the raid, the ip, Trevor Treasure trove of ai. I mean this cuz this is kind of like bringing two killer apps together. The Ansible configuration automation layer with ai just kind of a, >>Yeah, it's an amazing relationship. I was gonna say marriage, but I don't wanna say marriage cause I may be >>Last. I didn't mean say raid the Treasure Trobe, but the kind of >>Like, oh my God. An amazing relationship where we bring all this expertise around automation, obviously around IP and application infrastructure automation and IBM research, Richie and his team bring this amazing capacity and experience around ai. Bring those two things together and applying AI to automation for our teams is so incredibly fantastic. I just can't contain my enthusiasm about it. And you could feel it in the keynote this morning that Richie was doing the energy in the room and when folks saw that, it's just amazing. >>The geeks are gonna love it for sure. But here I wanna get into the whole evolution. Computers on computers, remember the old days thinking machines was a company generations ago that I think they've sold or went outta business, but self-learning, learning machines, computers, programming, computers was actually on your slide you kind of piece out this next wave of AI and machine learning, starting with expert systems really kind of, I'm almost say static, but like okay programs. Yeah, yeah. And then now with machine learning and that big debate was unsupervised, supervised, which is not really perfect. Deep learning, which now explores some things, but now we're at another wave. Take, take us through the thought there explaining what this transition looks like and why. >>I think we are, as I said, we are really at an inflection point in the journey of ai. And if ai, I think it's fair to say data is the pain of ai without data, AI doesn't exist. But if I were to train AI with what is known as supervised learning or or data that is labeled, you are almost sort of limited because there are only so many people who have that expertise. And interestingly, they all have day jobs. So they're not just gonna sit around and label this for you. Some people may be available, but you know, this is not, again, as I as Tom said, we are really trying to apply it to some very sort of key domains which require subject matter expertise. This is not like labeling cats and dogs that everybody else in the board knows there are, the community's very large, but still the skills to go around are not that many. >>And I truly believe to apply AI to the, to the word of, you know, enterprises information technology automation, you have to have unsupervised learning and that's the only way to skate. Yeah. And these two trends really about, you know, information technology percolating across every enterprise and unsupervised learning, which is learning on this very large amount of data with of course know very large compute with some very powerful algorithms like transformer architectures and others which have been disrupting the, the domain of natural language as well are coming together with what I described as foundation models. Yeah. Which anybody who plays with it, you'll be blown away. That's literally blown away. >>And you call that self supervision at scale, which is kind of the foundation. So I have to ask you, cuz this comes up a lot with cloud, cloud scale, everyone tells horizontally scalable cloud, but vertically specialized applications where domain expertise and data plays. So the better the data, the better the self supervision, better the learning. But if it's horizontally scalable is a lot to learn. So how do you create that data ops where it's where the machines are gonna be peaked to maximize what's addressable, but what's also in the domain too, you gotta have that kind of diversity. Can you share your thoughts on that? >>Absolutely. So in, in the domain of foundation models, there are two main stages I would say. One is what I'll describe as pre-training, which is think of it as the, the machine in this particular case is knowledgeable about the domain of code in general. It knows syntax of Python, Java script know, go see Java and so, so on actually, and, and also Yammel as well, which is obviously one would argue is the domain of information technology. And once you get to that level, it's a, it's almost like having a developer who knows all of this but may not be an expert at Ansible just yet. He or she can be an expert at Ansible but is not there yet. That's what I'll call background knowledge. And also in the, in the case of foundation models, they are very adept at natural language as well. So they can connect natural language to code, but they are not yet expert at the domain of Ansible. >>Now there's something called, the second stage of learning is called fine tuning, which is about this data ops where I take data, which is sort of the SME data in this particular case. And it's curated. So this is not just generic data, you pick off GitHub, you don't know what exists out there. This is the data which is governed, which we know is of high quality as well. And you think of it as you specialize the generic AI with pre-trained AI with that data. And those two stages, including the governance of that data that goes into it results in this sort of really breakthrough technology that we've been calling Project Wisdom for. Our first application is Ansible, but just watch out that area. There are many more to come and, and we are gonna really, I'm really excited about this partnership with Red Hat because across IBM and research, I think where wherever we, if there is one place where we can find excited, open source, open developer community, it is Right. That's, >>Yeah. >>Tom, talk about the, the role of open source and Project Wisdom, the involvement of the community and maybe Richard, any feedback that you've gotten since coming off stage? I'm sure you were mobbed. >>Yeah, so for us this is, it's called Project Wisdom, not Product Wisdom. Right? Sorry. Right. And so, no, you didn't say that but I wanna just emphasize that it is a project and for us that is a key word in the upstream community that this is where we're inviting the community to jump on board with us and bring their expertise. All these people that are here will start to participate. They're excited in it. They'll bring their expertise and experience and that fine tuning of the model will just get better and better. So we're really excited about introducing this now and involving the community because it's super nuts. Everything that Red Hat does is around the community and this is no different. And so we're really excited about Project Wisdom. >>That's interesting. The project piece because if you see in today's world the innovation strategy before where we are now, go back to say 15 years ago it was of standard, it's gotta have standard bodies. You can still innovate and differentiate, but yet with open source and community, it's a blending of research and practitioners. I think that to me is a big story here is that what you guys are demonstrating is the combination of research and practitioners in the project. Yes. So how does this play out? Cuz this is kind of like how things are gonna get done in the cloud cuz Amazon's not gonna just standardize their stack at at higher level services, nor is Azure and they might get some plumbing commonalities below, but for Project Project Wisdom to be successful, they can, it doesn't need to have standards. If I get this right, if I can my on point here, what do you guys think about that? React to that? Yeah, >>So I definitely, I think standardization in terms of what we will call ML ops pipeline for models to be deployed and managed and operated. It's like models, like any other code, there's standardization on DevOps ops pipeline, there's standardization on machine learning pipeline. And these models will be deployed in the cloud because they need to scale. The only way to scale to, you know, thousands of users is through cloud. And there is, there are standard pipelines that we are working and architecting together with the Red Hat community leveraging open source packages. Yeah. Is really to, to help scale out the AI models of wisdom together. And another point I wanted to pick up on just what Tom said, I've been sort of in the area of productizing AI for for long now having experience with Watson as well. The only scenario where I've seen AI being successful is in this scenario where, what I describe as it meets the criteria of flywheel of ai. >>What do I mean by flywheel of ai? It cannot be some research people build a model. It may be wowing, but you roll it out and there's no feedback. Yeah, exactly. Okay. We are duh. So what actually, the only way the more people use these models, the more they give you feedback, the better it gets because it knows what is right and what is not right. It will never be right the first time. Actually, you know, the data it is trained on is a depiction of reality. Yeah. It is not a reality in itself. Yeah. The reality is a constantly moving target and the only way to make AI successful is to close that loop with the community. And that's why I just wanted to reemphasize the point on why community is that important >>Actually. And what's interesting Tom is this is a difference between standards bodies, old school and communities. Because developers are very efficient in their feedback. Yes. They jump to patterns that serve their needs, whether it's self-service or whatever. You can kind of see what's going on. Yeah. It's either working or not. Yeah, yeah, >>Yeah. We get immediate feedback from the community and we know real fast when something isn't working, when something is working, there are no problems with the flow of data between the members of the community and, and the developers themselves. So yeah, it's, I'm it's great. It's gonna be fantastic. The energy around Project Wisdom already. I bet. We're gonna go down to the Project Wisdom session, the breakout session, and I bet you the room will be overflowed. >>How do people get involved real quick? Get, get a take a minute to explain how I would get involved. I'm a community member. Yep. I'm watching this video, I'm intrigued. This has got me enthusiastic. How do I get more confident with this opportunity? >>So you go to, first of all, you go to red hat.com/project Wisdom and you register your interests and you wanna participate. We're gonna start growing this process, bringing people in, getting ready to make the service available to people to start using and to experiment with. Start getting their feedback. So this is the beginning of, of a journey. This isn't the, you know, this isn't the midpoint of a journey, this is the begin. You know, even though the work has been going on for a year, this is the beginning of the community journey now. And so we're gonna start working together through channels like Discord and whatnot to be able to exchange information and bring people in. >>What are some of the key use cases, maybe Richie are starting with you that, that you think maybe dream use cases that you think the community will help to really uncover as we're looking at Project Wisdom really helping in this transformation of ai. >>So if I focus on let's say Ansible itself, there are much wider use cases, but Ansible itself and you know, I, I would say I had not realized, I've been working on AI for Good for long, but I had not realized the excitement and the power of Ansible community itself. It's very large, it's very bottom sum, which I love actually. But as I went to lot of like CTOs and CIOs of lot of our customers as well, it was becoming clear the use cases of, you know, I've got thousand Ansible developers or IT or automation experts. They write code all the time. I don't know what all of this code is about. So the, the system administrators, managers, they're trying to figure out sort of how to organize all of this together and think of it as Google for finding all of these automation code automation content. >>And I'm very excited about not just the use cases that we demonstrated today, that is beginning of the journey, but to be able to help enterprises in finding the right code through natural language interfaces, generating the code, helping Del us debug their code as well. Giving them predictive insights into this may happen. Just watch out for it when you deploy this. Something like that happened before, just watch out for it as well. So I'm, I'm excited about the entire life cycle of IT automation, Not just about at the build time, but also at the time of deployment. At the time of management. This is just a start of a journey, but there are many exciting use cases abound for Ansible and beyond. >>It's gonna be great to watch this as it unfolds. Obviously just announcing this today. We thank you both so much for joining us on the program, talking about Project wisdom and, and sharing how the community can get involved. So you're gonna have to come back next year. We're gonna have to talk about what's going on. Cause I imagine with the excitement of the community and the volume of the community, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Absolutely. >>This is absolutely exactly. You're excited about. >>Excellent. And you should be. Congratulations. Thank, thanks again for joining us. We really appreciate your insights. Thank you. Thank >>You for having >>Us. For our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Barton and you're watching The Cube Lie from Chicago at Ansible Fest 22. This is day two of wall to wall coverage on the cube. Stick around. Our next guest joins us in just a minute.

>>Good morning, everyone from Chicago Live. The Cube is live at Ansible Fast 2022. Lisa Martin and John Ferer are here for two days of multiple coverage on the cube. Very excited to be back in person. Ansible's 10th anniversary, the first in-person event. John, since 2019. Yeah, great to be perfect. One of the nuggets dropped this morning and I know you was Opss code. >>Yeah, we're gonna hear about that OPSIS code here in this segment. We're gonna get in, but the leader of the, the business unit at Ansible, part of Red Hat. So look forward >>To this. Exactly. Tom Anderson joins us, one of our alumni. Welcome back to the program. Thank you. The VP and general manager of Red Hat. First of all, how great is it to be back in person with live guests and an engaged audience and then robust community? >>It is amazing. It really is. I kind of question whether this day was ever gonna come again after three years of being apart, but to see the crowd here and to see, like you said, the energy in the room this morning and the keynotes, it's fantastic. So it's fa I just couldn't be happier. >>So opsis code nugget drop this morning. Yep. We wanna dissect that with you as, as that was mentioned in the keynote this morning. As Ansible is pushing into the cloud and and into the edge, what does OPSIS code mean for end users and how is it gonna help them to use a term that was used a lot in the keynote level up their automation? >>Yeah, so what we see is, look, the day zero, day one provisioning of infrastructure. There's lots of tools, there's lots of ways to do that. Again, it's just the company's ambition and dedication to doing it. The tools are there, they can do that. We see the next big opportunity for automation is in day two operations. And what's happening right now in ops is that you have multiple clouds, you've got multiple data centers and now you've got edge environments. The number of things to manage on a day-to-day basis is only increasing. The complexity is only increasing this idea of a couple years ago where we're gonna do shift everything left onto the developer. It's nice idea, but you still have to operate these environments on a day two basis. So we see this opportunity as opsis code, just like we did infrastructures code, just like we did configuration as code. We see the next frontier as operations code. >>Yeah, and this is really a big trend as you know with cube reporting a lot on the cloud native velocity of the modern application developer these days, they're under, they're, it's a great time to be a software developer because all the open source goodness is happening, but they're going faster. They want self-service, they want it built in secure, They need guardrails, they need, they need faster ops. So that seems to be the pressure point. Is ops as code going to be that solution? Because you have a lot of people talking about multi-cloud, multiple environments, which sounds great on paper, but when you try to execute it, Yeah, there's complexity. So you know, the goal of complexity management has really been one of the key things around ops. How do I keep speed up and how do I reduce the complexities? These are big. How does, how does ops code fit into that? >>Yeah, so look, we, we see Ansible as this common automation back plane, if you will, that goes across all of these environments. It provides a common abstraction layer so that whether you're running on Azure, whether you're a GCP or whether you're AWS or whether you're, you know, a PLC out on a shop industrial edge floor with a plc, each of those things need to be automated. If we can abstract that into a common automation language, then that allows these domain experts to be able to offer their services to developers in a way that promotes the acceleration, if you will, of those developers tasks. And that developer doesn't have to know about the underlying complexities of storage or database or cloud or edge. They can just do their >>Job. You know, Tom, one of the things I observed in Keynote, and it comes across every time I, we have an event and in person it's more amplified. Cause you see it, the loyalty of the customer base. You have great community. It's very not corporate like here. It's very no big flashy news. But there's some news, hard news, It's very community driven. Check the box there. So continuing on the roots, I wanna get your thoughts on how now the modern era we're in, in this world, the purchasing power, again, I mentioned multicloud looks good on paper, which every CX I wanna be multiple clouds. I want choice now. Now you talk to the people running things like, whoa, hold on, boss. Yeah, the bottoms up is big part of the selection process of how people select and buying consume technology with open source, you don't need to like do a full buy. You can use open source and then get Ansible. Yeah. This is gonna be a big part of how the future of buying product is and implementing it. So I think it's gonna be a groundswell, bottoms up market in this new cloud native with O in the ops world. What's your reaction to that? What's your thoughts? >>So here, here's my thoughts. The bulk of the people here are practitioners. They love Ansible, they use Ansible in their day to day job. It's how it helped, makes 'em successful. Almost every executive that I go out and talk to and our customers, they tell me one of their number one pro or their number one problem is attracting you talent and retaining the talent that they have. And so how can they do that? They can give them the tools to do their job, the tools that they actually like. So not a top down, you know, old fashioned systems management. You're gonna use this tool whether you like it or not. But that bottoms up swell of people adopting open source tools like Ansible to do their job and enjoy it. So I see it as a way of the bottoms up addressing the top down initiative of the organization, which is skills retention, skills enhancement. And that's what we focus on here at this event. Are the practitioners, >>Is that the biggest customer conversation topic these days? Is this the skills gap, retention, attraction talent? Would you say it's more expansive as the organizations are so different? >>Well, so a lot of the folks that I meet are, you know, maybe not sea level, but they're executives in the organization, right? So they're struggling with attract, you know, pretty much everywhere I go, I was in Europe this summer, conversation was always the same. We got two problems. Tracking people. We can't find people, people we find we can't afford. So we need to automate what they would do. And, and then the second piece is the complexity of our environment is growing, right? I'm being asked to do more and I can't find more people to do it. What's my solution? It's automation, you know, at the end of the day, that's what it comes down to. >>It's interesting, the people who are gonna be involved in the scaling horizontally with automation are gonna have the keys to the kingdom. The old joke when it was, you know, they run everything. They power the business now the business is digital. You gotta be hybrid. So we see hybrids a steady state right now, hybrid cloud. When you bring the edge into the equation, how do you see that developing? Because we think it's gonna be continually be hybrid and that's gonna extend out on the edge. What is the ansible's view on how the edge evolves? What's, what's going on there? Can you share your thoughts on the expansion to the edge? >>There's a, our experience is there's a rapid modernization happening out at the edge, industrial edge, you know, oil and gas platforms, retail locations, industrial floors, all that kind of stuff. We see this convergence of OT and IT happening right now where some of the disciplines that enterprises have used in the IT area are gonna expand out into ot. But some of the requirements of ot of not having skilled IT resources, you know, in the store, in the fast food restaurant, on the oil platform, needing to have the tools to be able to automate those changes remotely. We're seeing a real acceleration of that right now. And frankly, Ansible's playing a big role in that. And it's connecting a lot of the connective tissue is around network. What is the key piece that connects all of this environment as network and those number of endpoints that need to be managed. Ansible is, you know, >>It's way use case for Ansible because Ansible built their business on configuration automation, which was don't send someone out to that branch office back in the old days. Exactly. Do it. Manual versus automation. Hey, automation every time. Yes. This is at large scale. I mean the scale magnitude, can you scope the scale of what's different? I mean go even go back 10 years, okay, where we were and how we got here, where we are today. Scope the size of the scale that's happening here. >>You know, hundreds of thousands of endpoints and things. That's not even the API points, but that's the kind of compute points, the network points, the servers it's in. It's, it's, you know what we would've never thought, you know, 10 years ago, a thousand endpoints was a lot or 10,000 endpoints was a lot of things to manage when you start talking about network devices. Yeah, yeah. Home network devices for employees that are remote employees that need to be in a secured network. Just the order of magnitude, maybe two orders of magnitude larger than it has been in the past. And so again, coming home to the automation world, >>The world's spun in your front, your front door right now. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, >>Absolutely. Talk about, you talked about the acceleration. If we think of about the proliferation of, of devices online, especially the last two years, when, to your point, so many people shifted to remote and are still there. What are some of the, the changes in automation that we've seen as businesses have had to pivot and change so frequently and so many times to be successful? >>Yeah, so here's what we've seen, which is it's no longer acceptable for the owner of the network team or the ownership of the database or of the storage facility to, you can't wait for them to offer their service to people. Self-service is now the rule of thumb, right? So how can those infrastructure owners be able to offer their services to non IT people in a way that manages their compliance and makes them feel that they can get those resources without having to come and ask. And they do that by automating with Ansible and then offering those as package services out to their developers, to their QE teams, to their end users, to be able to consume and subscribe to that infrastructure knowing that they are the ones who are controlling how it's being provisioned, how it's being used. >>What are some of the, there were some great customers mentioned this morning in the keynote, but do you have a favorite example of a customer, regardless of industry that you think really shows the value and, and the evolution of the Ansible platform in its first 10 years and that really articulates the business value that automation delivers to a company? >>Yeah, no, it's a great question. I would think that, you know, if you wound the clock back 10 years, Ansible was all about server configuration management, right? That's what it was about was per provisioning, provisioning, you know, VMware infrastructure, vSphere, and then loading on VMs on top of that as it's expanded into network, into security and to storage and to database into cloud. It's become a much broader platform, if you will. And a good example is we have a customer, large oil and gas customer who is modernizing their oil platforms. I can imagine I not, I've not been on one, but I imagine the people that are out working on that oil platforms have greasy hands that are pushing on things. And they had this platform that the technology modernization included Azure. So connecting to data on Azure, rolling out new application updates, has to have a firewall, has to have network capabilities, has to have underlying OS to be able to do that. And Ansible was the glue that brought all that together to be able to modernize that oil platform. And so for me, that's the kind of thing where it sort of makes it real. You know, the actual businesses, >>The common set of services, this is, this is where we're seeing multi-cloud. Yeah. You start to have that conversation where, okay, I got this edge, it kind of looks the same, I gotta make it work. I'm a developer, I want some compute, I want to put this together. I have containers and orchestration behind it and kind of seeing the same kind of pattern. Yeah. Evolving at scale. So you guys have the platform, okay, I'm an open source. I love the open source. I got the platform 2.3, I see supply chain management in there. You got trusted signatures. That's a supply chain. We've been hearing a lot about security in the code. What else is in the platform that's updated? Can you share the, the, the new things that people should pay attention to in the platform? >>Yeah, we're gonna talk about a couple of things smaller around event driven Ansible, which is bringing Ansible into that really day two ops world where it's sort of hands free automation and, and, and operations where rather than someone pushing a button to trigger or initiate a piece of, of automation, an event will take place. I've detected an outta space condition, I've detected a security violation, I've detected something. Go to a rule book. That rule book will kick off in automation close that remediate that problem and close the thing without anyone ever having to do anything with that. So that's kind of one big area. And we're gonna talk tomorrow. We've got a real special announcement tomorrow with our friends from IBM research that I'm gonna, >>We'll have you on 10 30 Martha Calendars. >>But there's some really great stuff going on on the platform as we start to expand these use cases in multiple directions and how we take Ansible out to more and more people, automation out to more and more people from the inside, experts out to the consumers of automation, make it easier to create automation. >>Yeah. And one of the things I wanted to follow up on that and the skill gap, tying that together is you seeing heard in the keynote today around Stephanie was talking about enterprise architecture. It's not, I won't say corner case answer. I mean it's not one niche or narrow focus. Expanding the scope was mentioned by Katie, expand your scope grow, you got a lot of openings. People are hire now, Now Ansible is part of the enterprise architecture. It's not just one thing, it's, it's a complete, Explain what that means for the folks out there. Yeah. >>So when you start to connect what I call the technology domains, so the network team uses Ansible to automate their network infrastructure and configure all their systems. And the compute team uses it to deploy new servers on aws. And the security ops team use it to go out and gather facts when they have a threat detection happening and the storage team is using it to provision storage. When you start to then say, Okay, we have all these different domains and we want to connect those together into a set of workflows that goes across all of those domains. You have this common language and we're saying, okay, so it's not just the language, it's also the underlying platform that has to be scalable. It's gotta be secure. We talked about signing content. I mean, people don't understand the risk of an automation gone wild. You can, you can do a lot of damage to your infrastructure real fast with automation, just like you can do repair, right? So is what's running in my environment secure? Is it performant and is it scalable? I mean, those are the two, those are the three areas that we're really looking at with the platform right >>Now. Automation gone wild, it sounds like the next reality TV show. Yeah, I >>May, I may regret saying that. >>Sounds >>Like great. Especially on live tv. Great, >>Great podcast title right there. I made a mental note. Automation Gone Wild episode one. Here we are >>Talk about Ansible as is really being the, the catalyst to allow organizations to truly democratize automation. Okay. You, you talked about the different domains there and it seems to me like it's, it's positioned to really be the catalyst that's the driver of that democratization, which is where a lot of people wanna get to. >>Yeah. I mean for us, and you'll see in our sessions at Ansible Fest, we talk a lot about the culture, the culture of automation, right? And saying, okay, how do you include more and more people in your organization in this process? How can you get them to participate? So we talk about these ideas of communities of practice. So we bring the open source, the concepts of open source communities down into enterprises to build their own internal communities of practice around Ansible, where they're sharing best practices, skills, reusable content. That is one of the kind of key factors that we see as a success in inside organizations is the scales, is sort of bringing everybody into that culture of automation and not being afraid of automation saying, Look, it's not gonna take my job, it's gonna help me do my job better. >>Exactly. That automation argument always went, went to me crazy. Oh yeah, automating is gonna take my job away. You know, bank teller example, there's more bank tellers now than ever before. More atm. So the, the job shifts, I mean the value shifts. Yeah. This is kind of where the, where the automation helps. What's real quick, final minute we have left. Where does that value shift? I'm the person being automated away or job. Yeah. Where do you see the value job? Cause it's still tons of openings for people's skills, >>You know? So we see the shift from, particularly in operations from, here's my job, I look at a ticket queue, I grab a ticket, it's got a problem, I go look at a log, I look for a string and a log, I find out the air and I go, configuration change that. That's not a really, I wouldn't call that a fund existence for eight or 10 hours a day, but the idea, if I can use automation to do that for me and then focus on innovating, creating new capabilities in my environment, then you start to attract a new, you know, the next generation of operations people into a much more exciting role. >>Yeah. Architects too, they turned into architects that turned into the multiple jobs scope. It's like multi-tool player. It's like >>A, you know, Yeah, yeah. The five tool player, >>Five tool player in baseball is the best of the best. But, but kind of that's what's >>Happening. That's exactly what's happening, right? That's exactly what's happening. And it helps address that skills challenge. Yeah. And the talent challenge that organizations have as well. >>And everybody wants to be able to focus on delivering value to the organization. I have to get the end of the day. That's a human component that we all want. So it sounds like Ansible is well on its way to helping more and more organizations across industries achieve just that. Tom, it's great to have you back on the program. Sounds like you're coming back tomorrow, so we get day two of Tom. All right, excellent. Look forward to it. Congratulations on the first in-person event in three years and we look forward to talking to you >>Tomorrow. Thank you so much. >>All right, for our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube Live from Chicago, Day one of our coverage of Ansible Fest 2022. Stick around. John and I welcome back another Cube alumni next.

>>Hello from Chicago, Lisa Martin, back with you and John Furrier. This is day one of the Cube's coverage of Ansible Fest 2022. John, we've been having great conversations all morning about automation and how it's really pivotal and central. One of the things that we want to talk about next is automation as a strategy. Yeah. You know, some of the barriers to customer adoption, one of them is, well, can we, can we really understand where the most ROI is gonna be? But another one is automation happening kind of in pockets and silos. And we're gonna be talking next with one of our alumni about breaking those down. >>This is gonna be a great segment from the customer perspective, the conversations they're having problems trying to solve, and really got a great cube alumni back to share. And we're excited. It's be a good segment. >>We do have a great alumni, Walter Bentley, Fresh from the keynote stages back with us, the senior manager of the automation practice at Red Hat. Walter, it's great to have you back on the program. >>Thank you. Thank you for having me back. I really look forward to doing this every year and you know, it's, it's >>Exciting. So we had your great energetic keynote this morning and you were really talking about organizations need to think about automation from a strategic lens perspective, a really a true long term investment. Where are most organizations today and how are you gonna help them get there? >>Right. So most organizations today are kind of in that sweet spot where they've discovered that they can do the tactical automation and they can deal with those small day-to-day things. And now they wanna move into the space where they're really able to plug automation into their current workflows and try to optimize it. And, and that's the perfect direction to be heading. And, and what I always encourage our customers is that once you get to that point, don't stop. You gotta keep going because the next phase is, is when you begin to innovate with automation. And when automation is at first is, is at the beginning of the, of everything you're creating. And at that point, that's when you're really gonna see the great benefits from it. >>How have your customer conversations evolved over the last couple of years, particularly as the world has changed, but we've also seen the acceleration of automation and so much, so much advancement in the technology. >>Right. You know, you'll be shocked that our customers wanted us to speak to them in more of an enterprise architecture level. They wanted us to really be able to come in and help them design how they're going to lay out their automation vision. And that surprised me at first. My background being in architecture for many years, I didn't know that, you know, automation had evolved to that level. And, and that was one of the things that we, we tried to do our best to rise to the occasion and be able to answer that call. >>You know, Walter, one of the things when we were in person last in 2019, you were on the cube and then we did the remote. We were kind of right. You got it right. When we were, we were talking about this, Hey, if this goes the way we think it's gonna go, the automation layer is gonna be horizontally scaled with the cloud. So income, cloud, growth, lift and shift. Now I got some refactored applications in the cloud and I got on premises edge coming hybrid steady state. What does automation look like? You had said it's gonna scale. Yep. And so as clients realize, well this is was the kind of a group within the group doing some automation stuff with Ansible, all great stuff, Product leadership, great community check, check, check. Now, how do you make that a global architecture for a company? What, what's it take to make that an enterprise scale architecture? What's the next step for the, for the journey and, and for the community and the customers? >>So one of the major announcements today is actually one of the right steps in the right direction, which is now that you can deploy a on all of your hyperscalers, right? So you have it local, you're covering your private cloud area, now you're able to cover your hyperscalers. Now it's time to unite them together so that they can all kind of work as one function. And to me, that is the enterprise approach that that to aap. And I'm just so excited that we finally have rolled it out for aws. We have it for Azure, of course we have it inside. And we're also working on things like you said, like the edge, but also things like making sure we're covering customers that are air gaped customers that do not have the capability of the ingress in, in, in, in being, of being able to go in and out of that environment and that network. Right. We're working on strategic, strategic solutions to be able to do that better >>For what's interesting, we've been talking about super cloud on the cube. I, we coined that term at reinvent about people using cloud in a different way to kind of do things and it's become kind of also a, a term for multi-cloud. Yes. So if you think about what you just said, it's interesting, this cloud services that could, they all have stores, they have compute, There might be a day where they're all kind of invisible. Yes. And you can have spanning services across the cloud, but yet they can still differentiate on their own. So it's not so much about sneakers, it's more about that interoperability. How do you see that? What's your reaction to that? Right. >>Well, that's one of the core reasons why we move to the name of the answ automation platform. Platform being the key right? Is, is the platform is supposed to be able to span into different environments and really kind of unite them together. And that was one of the the things that I really liked about when we went to that late last year. Yeah. Late last year. And, and we've been working with our customers and make sure that we make that front and center, that they move towards that environment so that they can begin to do better scale and really operate at that, at that executive level. >>What's your favorite customer story that you think really articulates the value of what you just said? >>Right. So the one, so I'll give you a different one from the one that I, that I talked about on stage. And, and again, it it, when we went in from a services engagement, we did not expect the outcome of the fact that they would access this particular customer. We went in something very tactical, just laying down the platform for them. And, and the expectation was we would lay it down and walk away and then hopefully they would pick it up and kind of run with it. What we came to realize is that they liked the oversight and they liked the way that we were working with them. And they wanted to take those preferred approaches and really embed them Right. And their organization. And so they invited us back actually for two or three different consulting engagements to come back and just help them drive that adoption. And this is at the, they're at the very beginning, right? So they're doing it a little bit different in a lot of other organizations. The other organizations would lay down the platform, do some things, and then call us back to help them them with adoption, Right. >>Is the report card out? Yeah, >>Absolutely. They did it differently. And, and that to me stood out as the level of maturity their IT organization is. >>It sounds like they went from tactical to strategic Yes. Pretty quickly. Which is not normally the >>Case. No, no, not at all. Not normally the case. But as you can clearly see that, we're starting to see that more and more with our customers. They're upleveling, I hate for the theme, but they're upleveling. Right. And, and, and that's what I meant by my organization, my team that I, that I run, we have to do more with our customers because they're expecting more >>For them to level up. And I loved how that was used this morning. I'm like, Yeah, that's a cool term. Level up. We all gotta level up to some degree. How are you helping organizations do that from a cultural shift perspective? Because of course the people are so integral to this being successful. Can't forget >>That. Absolutely. So, you know, you know, remember the days of when you would have the DevOps team and that was like the thing, like you have to form your DevOps team and once you got that, you're good to go. And, and I always tell our customers that's a good start, but that's definitely not where you want to end. And you have to get to the point where you have all parts of your organization writing automation content, feeling comfortable, being able to kind of control their day to day. And so that's where you have to break down those silos. You have to really have those, you know, your operators and your developers and, and your DBAs and your networking folks really communicating. And, and if everyone kind of takes care of their own world and write content to control what they do on a day to day, they can bring those together. >>Walter, on buzzword it's been kicking around Silicon Valley in the tech industry re recently is multiplayer versus single player software. Yes. And I I heard that must be from gamers obviously. Yes. Discourse pop. I heard that on, stayed here in the matrix announcement earlier. You know, when you talk about teamwork ops devs while working together, clearly the operator role is changing. What that means is changing devs are getting stronger and more open source, they're shifting left and all that good stuff in the, in the CID pipeline as the teams work together, multiplayer in an organization. What's the success form of that you see emerging for how to organize, how to motivate, how to get people kind of in a good, you know, teamwork pass score kind of team oriented approach? >>Well, I'm really proud to talk about is how AAP has really enabled that and, and kind of fast tracks that ability for everyone to work together within a, the all the functionality that's now built into it. There's pieces of it that are focused on different operators or different parts of the IT organization, right. And, and, and we're made to be able to help to bring them all together. You know, I love the components such as the service catalog. You know, imagine being able to have a place where you can publish all of your, your content for other people to consume. You know, back in the day everything was stored in, in a repository, right? And you had to know what you were looking for. And so just small changes like that, having the, the, the Ansible toy, right? So you're having tools that are actually built in for those who are writing the content to be able to have at their fingertips the ability to test their content right from inside of the, the, the toy, right? So the terminal interface, just those small little nuances to me is what helps to bring it all together and kind of create that >>Great leverage glue. Yes. Not a lot of busy work and you know, absolutely. Hunting and packing for stuff like configuring manually. >>Absolutely. >>Awesome. What's next for you guys? >>Well, you know, we have some big announcements coming up tomorrow. I won't, I won't get into as much as I want to talk about >>It. Events. Yeah, >>Yeah, yeah. Something starts with the e but also some really fantastic technology. We're, what we're doing is, is we're really taking the idea of automation and really feeding into it in a sense that we're building into some mar some, some really smart technology into aap. And I'm, I'm, I'm excited, I'm excited for direction it's going and I know everyone tomorrow are gonna really, really hear some great >>Things. We heard upleveling, we heard upleveling culture shift. If I asked you what does culture shift mean, how would you answer that? >>I would answer that in a sense that it, it, the culture shift is, is shifting from the place where you feel that you're on an island and you have to solve for it alone as well as feeling that you have to solve for the whole ribbon of whatever you're working on. And that culture shift is moving from that mentality to the fact that you have a whole team of folks who may know how to solve for that already. And you feel comfortable being able to reach out to them and work with them to be able to build that. And that's, that to me is the change. You know, I'm, I'm a old school infrastructure dude, you know, I was the one who would, who would wake up two o'clock in the morning to fix a problem, right? I thought it was on me, but now the culture shift is now it's, we are a team and we're gonna work together to solve it. So that's, that's kind of my view on >>It. And the appetite in organizations is there, cuz oftentimes in the, in the siloed world, it's, I own this, this is my baby. Right? Right. How do you help them as a, as a trusted advisor to really open up the kimono and embrace that collaboration? Because ultimately that's the right strategic direction for the business, >>Right? The first step in that is making sure that everyone is kind of operating from the same book, right. Or the same plan. And, and until you actually write that plan down and publish it in a place for other people to consume it, it creates a little bit of a barrier, right? So that's the first thing we do is write down that plan, make it available for all the consume. And at the beginning, you know, not everyone runs to it, but over time if their curiosity begins to peak and then over time they begin to consume it and possibly contribute to it themselves over time, that's, that's how we kind of conquer that. And so far we've seen some good success. >>What would you say if someone said, you know, I want some proof, proof in the pudding proven methods to help accelerate the time to value with automation and help organizations to really understand and quantify the ROI for doing so. >>Right. And, and to me that's, this is the conversation I love having because we've, we've come out with something that we call success metrics and, and yes, they are exactly what they sound like, right? There are some metrics that you can use to measure in your organization to kind of determine your maturity around automation. The two key things that I would love to share about that is that when we think of metrics, right? We think of performance, we think of, you know, how well something is running, how long it's been running. Those are all great, but the two additional success metrics that we include in there are around more of the cultural field. The perception, right? The perception as well as how comfortable your employees feel using that product. And that's where that, that the shift of looking at the cultural, not just the technical side, but the cultural side of things has made a big difference. So I love sharing those metrics with our customers. It usually resonates and then we help them dig in on, to see how they, how they fit, and also give them some ideas as to how they can improve going forward. >>I'm sure they appreciate that knowing where that, where we are now, how do we get to the end, not the end state. Obviously it's a journey, but how do we get farther along in this from a unified front approach rather than absolutely operating in these silos, which is not gonna get us to the, the the on the journey that we should be on. Correct. Yeah. Yep. So some good stuff coming out tomorrow. Not gonna give us any nuggets, which totally understands. Nope. >>No, but it's, you're gonna be very excited. Yes. It's good stuff. >>Awesome. I gotta ask you one quick question before we wrap up. You mentioned multi-cloud earlier. This is a big conversation in the industry. A lot of people are debating what that is. It sounds good on paper. Where is the customer's view as they look at this journey? Because we, we see a future where there'll be services that won't be common across clouds. There's a differentiation and some that will be, and that, that just be shared like compute for instance. And let, let us be there where you can call in to the multi-cloud. What's, how do you, how do your customers think about multi-cloud? Are they having that conversation more they go, Is that more of a destination of the future? In their mind >>It feels more like a destination of the future. Right now, a lot of organizations have kind of solidified on one cloud per se that they want to be able to roll out as far as being able to scale up and down their resources. But the idea is, is eventually, you know, you, you're gonna go with whatever works best for that product or whatever works best for that, that business case that you're trying to solve for. And, and that's why I love the fact that AEP is kind of generically being able to be applied across all of them. So that, that is, that is gonna be your unifier, right? That's gonna be the layer that will stay the same no matter where you go. And that's one of the things that I love about our product around that is that, that we are meant to be the unifier and we're >>Bless the whole today. It's a great opportunity for Ansible that's there. All >>Right. To be the unifier. Last question for you before we wrap. What was some of the feedback about, from your session this morning on Ansible really being that unifier? Any, any folks come up to you and say anything that was particularly insightful? >>Well, you know what, it it, what was kind of alluded to or shared with me directly was the fact that, you know, thinking about automation as you would traditional platforms, right? And, and building a strategy and, and the idea that you need to write that down and actually make some decisions around that. And, and it wasn't that it wasn't thought about it, it was just, it just never came front to mind. And, and so I'm happy that I was able to plant that seed because that, that's what we're seeing that makes the difference between those who are very successful with automation and those, those who may >>Not be writing it down. Sometimes it's fact to basics that back to basics really help absolutely fuel the growth of organizations. Walter, thank you. Thanks for joining John and me on the queue today talking about what's going on, automation as a strategy, the vision and how Ansible is really on its way to becoming that unifier. We appreciate your insights. Cool. >>No, it's my pleasure. And thank you for having me again. All >>Right, cool. Our pleasure for Walter Bentley and John Furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube Live from Chicago. Day one of our coverage of Ansible Fest 2022 continues next.

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to Chicago theCUBE is live on the floor at AnsibleFest 2022, the first in-person Ansible event that we've covered since 2019. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. John, great to be here. There's about 1400 to 1500 people here in person, the partner ecosystem is growing and evolving, and that's going to be one of the themes of our next conversation. >> CloudScale is continuing to change the ecosystem, and this segment with AWS is going to be awesome. >> Exactly, we've got one of our alumni back with us, Stefanie Chiras joins us again, senior vice president, partner ecosystem success at Red Hat. and Manasi Jagannatha is also here Global Alliance Manager at AWS. Ladies, welcome to the program. >> Both: Thank you. >> Manasi: Nice to be here. >> Stefanie: Yeah. >> So some exciting news that came out. First of all was great to see you on stage. >> Thank you. >> In front of a live audience. The community is, you talked about this before we went live. The Ansible is nothing, if not the community. So I can only imagine how great that felt to be on stage in front of live bodies announcing the next step with Ansible and AWS. Tell us about that. >> I mean, you can't compete with the energy that comes from a live event. And I remember the first AnsibleFest I came to, it's just this electric feeling born out of the community, born out of collaboration and getting together feeds that collaboration in a way that like nothing else. >> Lisa: Can't do it by video alone. >> You cannot. And so it was so fun cuz today was big news. We announced that Ansible will be available through the AWS marketplace, the next step in our partnership journey. And we've been hearing like most of our announcements, we do these because customers ask for them. And that's really what is key. And the combination of what Red Hat brings to the table and what AWS brings to the table. That's what underpins this announcement this morning. >> Talk about it from a customer demand perspective and how you are not only meeting customers where they are, but you're speaking their language. >> Manasi: Yeah. >> Yeah, there's a couple of aspects and then I want to pass it to Manasi because nothing speaks better than a customer experience. But the specifics I think of what come together is this is where technology, procurement, experience, accessibility all come together. And it took both of us in order to do that. But we actually talked about a great example today, the TransUnion. >> So we have TransUnion, they are a credit reporting company and they're a giant customer. They use RHEL, they use AWS services. So while they were transitioning to the cloud, the first thing they wanted to know was compliance, right? Like, how do we have guardrails around compliance? That was a key feature for them. And then the other piece was how do we scale without increasing the complexity? And then the critical piece was being able to integrate with the depth of AWS services without having to do it over and over again. So what TransUnion did was they basically integrated Ansible automation platform with the AWS Cloud Control API that gave them the flexibility To basically integrate with what, 200 plus services? And it's amazing to see them grow over time. >> What's interesting is that Amazon, obviously cloud has been awesome. We've been covering it since the beginning. DevOps infrastructures code was the dream. Now it's app says code, you have configuration code before that. As cloud goes next level here, we're starting to see a lot more higher level services on AWS being adopted by customers. And so I want to get into how the marketplace deal works. So what's in it for the customer? Because as they bring Ansible across the enterprise and edge, now we're seeing that develop. If I'm the customer, am I buying it through the marketplace? What's the mechanics of the deal? Can I just tap into the bill, explain the marketplace workflow or how it works? >> Yeah, I'd love to do that. So customers come to the marketplace for three key benefits, right? Like one is the consumption based model, pay as you go, you can get hourly, annual, and spot instances. For some services you even get per second billing, right? Like, that's amazing, that's one. And then the other piece is John and Stefanie, as you know, customers would love to draw down on their EDPs, right? Like they want a single- >> EDPs, explain that with acronym. >> It's enterprise discount program. So they want a single bill where they can use third party services and AWS services and they don't have to go through the hustle of saying, "Hey, let me combine all these different pieces." So combining that, and of course the power of Ansible, right? Like customers love Ansible, they've built playbooks. The beauty of it is whatever you want to build on AWS, there is most likely a playbook or a module that already exists. So they can just tap into that and build into- >> Operationally it's a purchasing through marketplace. >> And you know, I mean, being an engineer myself, we always often get caught up in the technology aspect. Like what's the greatest technology? And everyone, as Manasi said, everyone loves the technology of Ansible, but the procurement aspect is also so important. And this is where I think this partnership really comes together. It is natively, Ansible is now, natively integrated into AWS billing. So one bill, you go and you log in. Now you have a Red Hat subscription, you get all the benefits from Red Hat that comes along with that subscription. But the like Ansible is all about simplicity. This brings simplicity to that procurement model and it allows you to scale within your AWS cloud environment that you have set up. And as Manasi mentioned, pull in those other native services from AWS. It's Great. >> It's interesting one of the things that buzzword Lisa and I were just talking as in the industry is the word multiplayer. I've heard people say that's multiplayer software, kind of a gaming analogy. But what you guys are doing is setting up, once they go with Ansible in the marketplace, they're just buying as things get more collaborative off the marketplace. So it kind of streamlines, if I get this right. >> Stefanie: Yep. >> The purchasing process. So they're already in, they just use it's on the bill. Is that kind of how it works? >> Yep. >> Absolutely done, yeah. >> So it the customer has a partnership with us more on the technology side and this particular case and with AWS and the procurement side, it brings that together. >> So multiplayer software, is it multiplayer software? >> We like to talk about multi-partner solutions and I think this provides a new grounding for other partners to come in and build upon that with their services capabilities, with their other technology capabilities. So well clearly in my world, we talk about multi-partner. (both laughs) >> Well, what you're doing is empowering the developers. I know that Red Hat is one of its goals is let's make things much more seamless, much smoother for the developers as the buyer's journey has changed. And John, you've talked about that quite a bit. You're empowering those buyers to actually have a much simpler, streamlined process and to be able to start seeing automation become democratized across organizations. >> Yeah, and one of the things I love about the announcement as well is it pulls in the other values of Ansible automation platform in that simplicity model that you mentioned with like things like certified collections, certified collections that have been built by partners. We have built certified collections, to go along with this offering as well as part of the AWS offering that pulls in these other partner engagements together. And as you said, democratizes not only what we've done together, but what we've done with other partners together. >> Lisa: Right. >> Yeah. >> Can you kind of talk kind of about the depths of the partnership, the co-engineering, and sort of the evolution and the customer involvement in the expansion of the partnership? >> Yeah, I'd love to walk you through that. So we've had a longstanding partnership coming up on 15 years now Stefanie, can you believe it? >> Stefanie: Yeah. (laughs) >> 15 years we've been building, to give you some historical context, right? In back in 2008 we launched RHEL and in 2015 we supported SAP workloads on RHEL. And then the list goes on, right? Like we've been launching Graviton instances, Arm instances, Nitro. The key to be noted here is that every new instance Launch, RHEL has always been supported on day one, right? Like that's been our motto. So that's one. And then in 2021, as you know, we launched Rosa Red Hat OpenShift service on AWS. And that's helped customers with their modernization journey to AWS. So that's been context historically around where we were and where we are today. And now with Ansible, it just gives customer another tool in their arsenal, right? And then the goal is to make sure we meet customers where they are, give them all the Red Hat products that they love using on their hybrid workloads. >> Sounds like a lot is coming maybe at re:Invent too, coming up. >> Yeah. >> What's next? >> This is the beginning, right? We'll continue to grow and based upon not only laying the building blocks for what customers can build with, and you mentioned Lisa, right? We follow this journey that Manasi talked about because of what customers ask for. So it's always a new adventure to determine what'll come next based upon what we hear from our joint customers. >> On that front though, Stefanie, talk about the impact of the broader ecosystem that this is just scratching the surface. >> One of the things, and we've been going through a whole transformation at Red Hat about how we engage with the ecosystem. We've done organizational shifts, we've done a complete revamp of how we engage with the ecosystem. One of our biggest focus is to make sure that the partnerships that we have with one partner bring value to the rest of our partners. No better example than something like this when we work with AWS to create accessibility and capability through a procurement model that we know is important to customers. But that then serves as a launch point for other partners to build certified collections around or now around validated content, which we talked about today at AnsibleFest, that allows other partners to engage. And we're seeing a huge amount in services partners, right? Automation is so pervasive now as customers want to go out and scale. We're seeing services partners really come in and help customers go from, it's always challenging when you have a broad set of IT. You have cloud native over here, you have bare metal over here, you have virtual, it's complex. >> John: Yeah. >> There's sometimes an energy activation barrier to get over that initial automation. We're seeing partners come in with really skilled services capabilities to help customers get over that hump to consolidate with an automation plan. It gets them better equipped to do day one automation and day two automation. And that's where Ansible automation platform is going. It's not just about configuration management, it's about day two management as well. >> Talk about those barriers a little bit more and how Ansible and AWS together are helping customers really knock those out of the park. Another baseball reference for you. We see that a lot of organizations, the skills gap, which we've talked about already on the conversation today, but Ansible as being a facilitator of helping organizations to attract talent, to retain talent, but also customers that maybe don't know where to start or don't know how to determine the ROI that automating processes will bring. How can this partnership help customers nock those out of the park? >> So I'll start and then I'll pass it to Manasi here. But I think one of the key things in this particular partnership is just plain old accessibility. Accessibility, which public cloud has taught the world a new way to get fast access that consumption based pricing. Right you can get your hands on it, you can test it out, you can have a team go in and test it out, and then you can see it's built for scale. So then you can scale it as far as you want to go forward. We clearly have an ecosystem of services partners, so does AWS to help people then sort of take it to the next level as they want to build upon it. But to me the first step is about accessibility, getting your hands dirty. You can build it into those committed spend programs that you may have with AWS as well to try new things. But it's a great test bed. >> Absolutely. And then to add to what Stefanie said, together Red Hat and AWS, we have about a hundred thousand partners combined, right? Like resellers, sis, GSI, distributors. So the reach the combined partnership has just amplifies. >> Yeah, it's huge news. I think it's a big deal because you operationalize the heavy lifting of procurement for all your joint customers and the scale piece is huge. So congratulations. I think it's going to make a lot of money for Ansible. So good call there. My question is, as we hear here, the next level's edge. So AWS has been doing a ton of hybrids since outpost announcement years ago. Now you got all kinds of regional expansions, you've got local zones, you've got all kinds of new edge activity. So are there dots connecting here with the edge with Red Hat Ansible? >> Do you want- >> Yeah, so I think we see two trends with our customers, right? Like mainly I'm specifically talking about our RHEL customer base on AWS. We have almost hundreds to thousands of customers using RHEL on AWS. These are 90% of fortune 500 companies use RHEL, right? So with that customer base, they are looking to expand your point into the edge. There's outposts, there are so many hybrid environments that they're trying to expand in. So just adding Ansible, RHEL, Rosa, OpenShift, that entire makes, just gives customers that the plethora of products they need to run their workloads everywhere, right? Like we have certifications outpost, we have certifications with OpenShift, right? So it just completes the puzzle, if you- >> So it's a nice fit. >> Yeah. >> It is a really nice fit. And I love Edge and Edge once you start going distributed, this automation aspect is key for all the reasons, for security reasons to make sure you do it the same way every single time. It's just pervasive in it. But things like the Cloud Control API allow it to bridge into things like Outpost. It allows a simple way, one clean way to do API and then you can expand it out and get the value. >> So this is why you are on stage and you said that Ansible's going to expand the scope to be more enterprise architecture. >> Stefanie: That's right. >> That's essentially what you're getting at. This is now a distributed computing fabric at cloud scale on AWS. >> Stefanie: That's right. >> Did I get that right? >> Yep, and it touches all the different deployments you may have, on-prem, virtual, cloud native, you name it. >> So how do the people turn into architects? Cuz this is, again, we had this earlier conversation with Tom, multi-tool players, a baseball analogy I used. It's like signifies the best player, your customers are becoming multiple tool players or operators. The new operator is now the top talent. They got to run Ansible, they got to automate, they got to provide services to the cloud native developers. So this new role is emerging, it's not a cloud architect but it's, if it's going to be system architecture wide, what's this new person look like that's going to run all this? >> I think it's an interesting question. We were talking yesterday, actually, Tom and I were talking with the partners. We had Partner Day, the first ever at AnsibleFest yesterday, which was great. We got a lot of insight. They talked a lot about this platform focus, right? Customers are looking to create that platform so that the developers can come in and build upon it without compromising what they want to do. So I do think there's a move in that direction to say how do you create these platforms at a company that no compromises, but it provides that consistency. I would say one thing in partnerships like this, I think customer expectations on the partner ecosystem to have it be trusted is increasing. They expect us as we've done to have our engineers roll up their sleeves together to come to the table together. That's going to show up in our curated content. It's going to show up in our validated content. Those are the places I think where we come up from the bottom through our partnership and we help bridge that gap. >> John: Awesome. >> And trust was brought up a number of times this morning during the keynote. We're almost out of time here, but I think it's one of those words that a lot of companies use. But I think what you're showing is really the value in it from Ansible's perspective from AWS's perspective and ultimately the value in it for the customer. >> Stefanie: Yes. >> So I got to ask you one final question. >> Stefanie: Absolutely. >> And maybe as as reinvent is around the corner, what's next for the partnership? Obviously big news today, Manasi, looking down down the pipe- >> Stefanie: Big news today. >> What are some of the things that you think are going to become next that you can share? >> I mean at this point, and I'll pass it to Manasi to close us out, but we are continuing to follow, to meet our customers where they want to be. We are looking across our portfolio for different ways that customers want to consume within AWS. We'll continue to look at the procurement models through the partner programs that Manasi and the team have had. And to me the next step is really bringing in the rest of the ecosystem. How do we use this as a grounding step? >> Yeah, absolutely. So we are always listening to customer feedback and they want more Red Hat products in the marketplace. So that's where we'll be. >> In the marketplace. >> Congratulations great deal. >> Yes great work there guys. And customers always want more. That's the thing. But that's what keeps us going. So we love it. >> Absolutely. >> Thank you so much for joining John and me on the program today. It's been great to have you. And congratulations again. >> It's a pleasure. >> Thank you. >> For our guests and for John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Live from Chicago at AnsibleFest 2022. This is only day one of our coverage. We'll be back after a short break for more. (upbeat music)

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to Chicago. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. We're live with the Cube at Ansible Fest 2022. This is not only Ansible's 10th anniversary, John Wood. It's the first in-person event in three years. About 14 to 1500 people here talking about the evolution of automation, really the democratization opportunities. Ansible >>Is money, and this segment's gonna be great. Cub alumni are back, and we're gonna get an industry perspective on the automation journey. So it should be great. >>It will be great. We've got two alumni back for the price of wine. Scott Canine joins us, Director of Worldwide Automation at Kendra. A Nelson Shoe is back as well. Product marketing director at Red Hat. Guys, great to have you back on the, on the live cube. >>Oh, thank you for having us. And, and you know, it's really great to be back here live and in person and, and, you know, get a chance to see you guys again. >>Well, and also you get, you get such a sense of the actual Ansible community here. Yeah. And, and only a fraction of them that are here, but people are ready to be back. They're ready to collaborate in person. And I always can imagine the amount of innovation that happens at these events, just like off the show floor, people bumping into each other and go, Hey, I had this idea. What do you think, Scott? It's been just about a, a year since Kenel was formed. Talk to us about the last close to a year and what that's been like. Especially as the world has been so, chops >>The world been Yeah, exactly. Topsy turvy. People getting back to working in person and, and everything else. But, you know, you know, throw on that what we've done in the last year, taking Kendra, you know, outside of being a part of ibm Right. In our own company at this point, you know, and you know, you hear a lot of our executives and a lot of our people when we talk about it, like, Oh yeah, it's, you know, it's a $19 billion startup. We got freedom of action. We can do all these different things. But, you know, one of the ways I look at it is we are a $19 billion startup, which means we've got a lot of companies out there that are trusting us to, no matter what change we're doing, continue to deliver their operations, do it flawlessly, do it in a way so they can continue to, to service their clients effectively and, and don't break 'em. And, and so that to me, you know, the way we do that and the way I focusing on that is automation Ansible, obviously corridor strategy, getting there. >>Yeah. And I'd like to get your thoughts too, because we seeing a trend, we've been reporting on this with the cloud growth and the scale of cloud and distributed computing going cloud native, the automation is the front and piece center of all conversations. Automate this, make developers go faster. And with the pandemic, we're coming out of that pandemic. You post pandemic with large scale automation, system architecture, a lot more like architectural conversations and customers leaning on new things. Yeah. What are you seeing in this automation framework that you guys are talking about? What's been the hot playbook or recipe or, or architecture to, you know, play on words there, but I mean, this is kind of the, the key focus. >>Yeah. I mean, if you, one of the things that I com customer comp talks, I've been pulled into a lot recently, have all been around thinking about security, right? A lot in terms of security and compli, I think, I mean, think about the world environment as a whole, right here, everything that's been going on. So, so people are, are conscious of how much energy that's being used in their data centers, right? And people are conscious of how secure they are, right? Are they, you know, the, their end customers are trusting them with data information about them, right? And, and they're trusting us to make sure that those systems are secure to make sure that, you know, all that is taken care of in the right way. And so, you know that what's hot security and compliance, right? What can we do in the energy space, right? Can we do things to, to help clients understand better their energy consumption as, as, you know, especially as we get now in Europe to the winter months, can we do things there that'll help them also be better in that space, Right? Reduce their >>Costs and a lot more cloud rails obviously right there. You got closer and you got now Ansible, they're kind of there to help the customers put it together at scale. This has been the big conversation last year, remember was automate, automate, automate, right? This year it's automation everywhere, in every piece of the, the landscape edge. It's been big discussion tomorrow here about event driven stuff. This is kind of a change of focus and scope. Can you like, share your thoughts on how you see how big this is in terms of the, the, the customer journey >>In terms, I'm sorry, in terms of, >>In terms of their architecture, how they're rolling out automation, >>What's their Yeah, yeah. So, so in terms of their rolling out arch, arch in terms of them consuming architecture, right? And the architecture or consuming automation. Yeah. And rolling out the architecture for how they do that. You know, again, it, to me it's, it's a lot of, it's been focused around how do we do this in the most secure manner possible? How do we deliver the service to them and the most secure managers possible? How do they understand that it, that they can trust the automation and it's doing the right things on their environments, right? So it's not, you know, we're not pushing out or, or you know, it's not making bad policies >>And they're leaning on you guys. >>It's, it's not being putting malware out there, right? At the same time we're doing different things. And so they really rely on, on our customers, rely on us to really help them with that journey. >>I think a, a big part of that with Kendra as such a great partner and so many customers trusting them, is the fact that they really understand that enterprise. And so as, as Scott talks about the security aspect, we're not just talking to the IT operations people, right? We're talking across the enterprise, the security, the infrastructure, and the automation around that. So when we talk about hybrid cloud, we talk about network and security edge is a natural conversation to that, cuz absolutely at the edge network and security automation is critical. Otherwise, how are you gonna manage just the size of your edge as it grows? >>Yeah. And, and we've been, and that's another area that we've been having a a lot more conversations with clients on, is how do you do automation for IOT and edge based devices, right? We, you know, traditionally data center cloud, right? Kind of the core pieces of where we've been focusing on, but I, you know, recently I've been seeing a lot more opportunities and a lot more companies coming forward saying, you know, help us with the network space, help us with the iot space. We really wanna start getting to that level of automation and that part of our environments. And what >>Are some of the key barriers that customers are coming to you with saying, help us overcome these so that they can, you're smiling so that they can, can obviously attract and retain the right talent and also be able to determine what processes to automate to extract the most value and the most ROI for the organization. >>Yeah. And, and, and you know, that's, that's an interesting, the ROI conversation's always an interesting one, right? Because when you start having that with customers, some of the first things they think about, or the first, the natural place people go is, >>Oh, >>Labor takeout. I can do this with less people. Right? But that's not the end all be all of automation. In fact, you know, my personal view is that's, you know, maybe the, the the bottom 30%, right? That's kind of, then you have to think about the value you get above and beyond that standard operations, standardized processes, right? How are you gonna able to do those faster? How's that enabling your business, right? What's all the risks that's now been taken out by having these changes codified, right? By having them done in a manner that is repeatable, scalable, and, and, and really gets them to the point of, you know, what their business needs from an operational standpoint and >>Extracting that value. Nelson, talk about the automation journey from your perspective, How have you seen that evolve from your lens, especially over the last couple of years? >>It's a great question. You know, it's interesting because obviously all of our customers are at different stages of their automation journey. We have someone that just beginning looking at automation, they've been doing old scripts, if you will, the past. And then we have more that are embracing it, right? As a culture. So we have customers that are building cultures of automation, right? They have standups, they have automation guilds. It's, it's kind of a little bit of a, of a click. It's kind of, you know, building up steam in that momentum. And then we have, you know, the clients that Kindra works with, right? And they're very much focused on automation because they understand that they have a lack of resources, they don't have the expertise, they don't have the time to be able to deliver all this. Yeah. And that's really, Kendra really comes into effect to really help those customers accelerate their automation. Yeah. Right. And to that point, you know, we're doing a lot of innovation work with Kendra and we lean on them heavily because, you know, they're willing to make that commitment as a partner both on the, the, the day to day work that we do together as well as Ford looking at different architectures. >>Yeah. And, and the community aspect from our side internally has been tremendous in terms of us being able to expand what we'll be doing with automation and, and what a's been able to do with that community to get there. Right? Yeah. So to last month we did about 33 million day one, day two operations through automation, right? So that's what we've done. If you look at it, you know, if I break it down, it's really 80% of that standard global process stuff that we bring to the table. 20% of that is what our, our account teams are bringing specifically to their clients based on their needs and what they need to get done. Right. You know, one of my favorite examples of of, of this, right? We have a automation example out there for a, a client we've got in Japan, right? They tie, you know, they're, they're obviously concerned, you know, security a everything else that we've been talking about. >>They're also concerned about resiliency, right? In the face of natural disasters. Yeah. So they took our automation, they said, Okay, we're gonna tie your platform to seismic data that's coming through, and we understand what seismic data's happening. Okay, it's hitting a certain event. Let's automatically start kicking off resiliency operations so we can be prepared and thus keeps serving our clients when that's happening. Right? And that's not something like when you talk about a global team coming in and, and saying, we're gonna do all this. It's that community aspect, getting, getting the account focus, getting to that level, right? That's really brings value to clients. And that's one of the use cases, you know, and aaps enabled us to do with the a the community approach. We've got >>Now talk about this partnership. I think earlier when we were talking to Stephanie and Tom, the bottoms up Ansible community with top down kind of business objectives kind of come into play. You guys have a partnership where it's, there's some game changing things happening because Ansible's growing, continuing to have that scope grow from a skill set standpoint, expand the horizons, doing more automation at scale, and then you got business objectives where people wanna move faster in their, in their digital transformation. So to me, it's interesting that this part kind of hits both. >>It does really hit both. I mean, you know, the community cloud that Kendra has is so critical, right? Because they build that c i CF architecture internally, but they follow that community mantra, if you will. And community is so important to us, right? And that's really where we find innovation. So together with what we were call discussing about validated content earlier today becomes critical to build that content to really help people get started, Right? Validated content, content they can depend on and deliver, right? So that becomes critical on the other side, as you mentioned, is the reality of how do we get this done? Yeah. Right? How do we mature, how do we accelerate? And without the ability to drive those solutions to them to fix, if you are the problems that the line of business has. Well, if you don't answer those questions with the innovation, with the community, and then with the ap, it's, it, it does, it's gotta all come >>Together as, I mean, that community framework is interesting. I think we hear a lot in the cube, you know, Hey, let's do this. Sounds good. Who's gonna do it? Someone who's the operator. So there's a little skills gap going on. It's also a transformation in the roles of the operators in particular, and the dev, So the DevOps equation's completely going to the next level, right? And this is where people wanna move faster. So you're seeing a lot more managed services, a lot more Yes. Services that's, I won't say so much top down, but more like, let's do it and here's a play to get it done, right? Then backfill on the hiring, whether it's taking on a little bit of technical debt or going a little faster to get the proof points, >>Right? And I think one of the critical aspects is, you know, Ansible has it certified collections, right? And oftentimes we, we don't, I don't, I meet with customers two, three times a week, right? There's not a single one that doesn't emphasize the importance of partners and the importance of certified collections, Right? And kindra is included in that, right? Because they bring a lot of those certified collections. Use them, leverage them, it's helps customers get a jumpstarter, right? It's a few, it's their easy button, right? But they only get that and they value that because of the support that's there. >>Yeah. Right? They get the with >>The cert. Yeah. I was gonna say, just adding on the certified collections, right? We, so, you know, it was, it was great to see the hub come out with those capabilities because, you know, as we've gone through the last 12 months and, and change, one of the things that we focused more in on is network devices, network support, right? And, and so, you know, some of the certified collections out there for Cisco for F five, right? Some of those things we've been able to take back in and now build on top of with the expertise that we, we have in that space as well. And then use that as a starting point to more value for our clients. >>How is Kentrell working together with, with Red Hat and with Ansible to help organizations like you mentioned Nelson, they're on the journey varies considerably. Some are well on their way, others aren't. But for those to really start developing an automation, first culture, we talked a lot about cultural ship, we talked about it this morning. You can feel the power of that community and driving it, but how do you guys work together to help companies and any industry kind of really start understanding what an automation first culture is and then building it internally and getting some grounds? Well, >>Well, it's interesting, right? One of the, one of the things that really is we found really helpful is assessments, right? So you have silos and pockets of automation, and that's that challenge, right? So to be able to bring that, if you are automation community within an enterprise together, we often go out and we'll do an assessment, right? An automation assessment to really understand holistically how the enterprise could leverage automation not just in the pockets, but to bring it together. And when they bring that automation together, they can share, playbooks can share their experiences, right? And with Kindra and the multiple and the practices they have, right? They really bring that home from an industry perspective. They also bring that home, if you will, from a technology perspective. And they bring that together. So, you know, Kindra in that respect is the glue for our customer success. >>What's news? What's the next big thing that you guys see? Because if this continues down the road, this path, people are gonna get, the winds gonna get the successes. The new beachhead, if you will, is established. You got the edge around the corner. What's next for you guys in the partnership? How do you see it developing? >>No, we're looking at >>No, it's all good. So really, you know, I, I mentioned it earlier and, and the jour the automation journey paralleled by innovation, right? Customers today are automating, they're doing a great job. There's multiple tools out there. We understand we're not gonna be the only tool in the shed, but Ansible can come in and integrate that entire environment. And in a hybrid cloud environment, you want that there, right? I think what next is obviously the hybrid cloud is critical. The edge is critical, right? And I think that, you know, the needs and the requirements that Kindra hears that we have is kind of that future. And, you know, we, we often, often in, in Red Hat, we talk about a north star, right? And when I work with partners, ikin, do we talk about the North Star, where we want to get to? And that is the acceleration of automation. And I think both by the practical aspect of working with our customers and the innovation as partners, as business partners, technology partners will help accelerate >>That. Yeah. Scott, your perspective to bridge to the future is obviously hybrid and edge, how you bringing your customers along? >>Yes. So, so we see, you know, when we talk about my, when I talk about my automation strategy, our automated strategy, right? It's about being automated, orchestrated and intelligent, right? Kind of those, those three layers of the stack. We've been building out a lot of work, what we call our integrated AIOps layer for actionable insights, right? We've got a, you know, a goal to integrate that and, and we have integrated into our automation service for how we're delivering the whole package to our clients so they can better see opportunities for automation. What's the best way to go about it? You know, what are the, what are some of the, the issues they have, vulnerabilities they have in their environment and really bringing it to them in, in a real holistic manner. In fact, we internally, we call it our F five steering wheel, right? Based on the, the race thing, right? >>Because you think about the, the racing cars, f fives know they're right there, right? They got everything they need in front of 'em. Yeah. So our goal is been to, to include that into our automation view and service and build that out, right? So that's one way we're doing it. The additional way is, is through some announcements you probably heard, hopefully heard the last couple weeks through something called Kendra Bridge, right? Kendra Bridge is more the digitization of, of the way we deliver services for our clients to make it easier for them to consume and, and to, to make the barrier to entry for things like getting automation, getting it more in their environment, right? Lower as much as possible, right? So really integrated AIOps kind bridge. Those are really the two ways we see it as, as going forward. >>It's interesting, you know, we live through a lot of these different inflection points in the industry. Every time there's a big inflection point, there's more complexity that needs to be tamed, you know? And so you got innovation. If you got innovation coming and you got the clients wanna simplify and tame the complexity, this is a big part of what you guys do. >>Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, how do we, you know, most, when the clients come to us, right? Like I said, one, it's about trust. They trust us to do it because we can make it easy for them to not have to worry about that, right? Yeah. They don't have to worry about what it takes to secure the environment, manage it, run it, design it, build it for the, the cloud. We give 'em the ability, we give them the ability to focus on their core business while we do the stuff that's important to them, which >>Is absolutely critical that you, you can't emphasize trust in this relationship enough. I wish we had more time, guys, you're gonna have to come back. I think that's basically what this is boil down to. But thanks so much guys for talking with John and me about how Kendra and and Ansible are working together, really enabling your customers to, to unlock the value of automation across their organization and really make some big business changes. We appreciate your insights and your time. Fantastic. Thank you. Happy to do it and happy to do it any time. All right. Our pleasure. Thank you so much for our guests and John Furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube Live from Chicago. This is day one of our coverage of Ansible Fest 22. Don't go anywhere. Our next guest joins us in just a minute.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to AnsibleFest, 2021, the virtual version. This is The Cube and my name is Dave Volante. We're going to dig into automation and its continuing evolution. Tom Anderson is here. He's the vice president of Red Hat Ansible, the automation platform. And Richard Henshall is also here, Senior Manager of Ansible Product Management, of course, at Red Hat. Guys, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you for having us Dave. You're welcome, so Rich with this latest release of the Ansible Automation Platform, AAP, we'll get the acronyms out of the way. The focus seems to be an expanding the reach of automation and its potential use cases. I mean, I'll say automation everywhere, not to be confused with the RPA vendor, but the point is, you're trying to make it easier to automate things like provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, throw in orchestration and all these other IT processes. Now, you've talked about this theme in previous releases of AAP. So what's new in this release? What can customers do now that they couldn't do before? >> Yeah, it's a good question thank you. So, we look at this in two dimensions. So, the first dimension we have is like where automation can happen, right? So, you know, we always have traditional data center, clouds being been very prevalent for us for the last, you know, sort of five, 10 years in most people's view. But now we have the Edge, right? So now we have Edge computing, which is sometimes a lot more of the same, but also it comes with a different dynamic of how it has to be sort of used and utilized by different use cases, different industry segments. But then, while you expand the use cases to make sure that people can do automation where they need to do it and make sure if we don't close to the Edge or close to the data center, based on where the technology needs to be run, you also have to think about who's now using automation. So, the second dimension is making sure that different users can take access. You mentioned like application deployment, or infrastructure, or network configuration. We expand the number of different users we have that are starting to take advantage of Ansible. So how do we get more developers? How do we get into the developer workflow, into the development workflow, for how Ansible is created, as well as how we help with the operational, the posts deployment stage that people do operating automation, as well as then the running of Ansible Automation Platform itself. >> Excellent, okay. So, in thinking about some of those various roles or personas, I mean, I think about product leads. I would see developers, obviously you're going to be in there. Managers I would think want that view. You know the thrust seems to be, you're trying to continue to enhance the experience, for these personas and others, I suppose, with new tooling. Maybe you could add some color to that and what's happening in the market Tom if you take this and Rich chime in, what's happening in the market that makes this so important? Who are the key roles and personas that you're targeting? >> Yeah. So, there's a couple of things happening here. I mean, traditionally the people that had been using Ansible to automate their subsystems were the domain expert for that subsystem, right? I'm the storage operations team. I'm the network operations team. I'm using this tool to automate the tasks that I do day to day to operate my piece of the sub system. Now, what they're being asked to do is to expose that subsystem to other constituencies in the organization, right? So they had not, they're not waiting for a call to come in to say, can I have a network segment? Can I have this storage allocated to me? Can I deploy these servers so I can start testing or building or deploying my application. Those subsystems need to be exposed to those different audiences. And so the type of automation that is required is different. Now, we need to expose those subsystems in a way that makes those domain owners comfortable. So they're okay with another audience having access to their subsystem. But at the same time, they're able to ensure the governance and compliance around that, and then give that third-party that developer, that QE person, that man, that business, that line of business manager, whoever it might be, that's accessing that resource, a interface that is friendly and easy enough for them to do. It's kind of the democratization. I know it's a cliche, but the democratization of automated automation within organizations, giving them roles, specific experiences, of how they can access these different subsystems and speed their access to these systems and deploy applications. >> So if we could stay on that for a second, cause that's a complicated situation. You're now opening this up. You Richard mentioned the Edge. So you got to make sure that the person that's getting access has access, but then you also have to make sure that that individual can't screw it up, do things that you don't want that individual to do. And it's probably a whole other set of compliance issues and policy things that you have to bake in. Is that, am I getting that right? >> Yeah. And then that's the aspect of it. When you start to think, you know, Tom listed off there, you know, 10, you can just keep adding different sort of personas that individuals that work in roles, identify with as themselves. I'm a network person, I'm a storage person. To us they're all just Ansible users, right? There may be using a slightly different way, maybe using it slightly different places, but they're just an Ansible user, right? And so as you have, like those people that just like become organically, you've now got thousands potentially of Ansible users inside a large enterprise organization, or if you know, a couple of hundred if your smaller. But you're then go, well, what do I do with Ansible, right? And so at that point, you then start to say, now we try to look at it as what's their use of Ansible itself, because it's not just a command line tool. It's got a management interface, it's got analytics, we've got content management, we've got operational runtime, we've got responsiveness to, you know, disaster recovery scenarios for when, you know, when you need to be able to do certain actions, you may use it in different ways at different places. So we start, try and break out, what is the person doing with Ansible Automation Platform at this part of their workflow? Are they creating content, right? Are they consuming content, or are they operating that automation content for those other constituent users that Tom referred to. >> Yeah, that's really helpful because there's context, there are different roles, different personas need different contexts, you know, trying to do different things. Sometimes somebody just wants to see the analytics to make sure it's, you know, hey, everything's green, Oh, we got a yellow, versus, hey actually want to make some changes and I'm authorized to do so. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about containers. I want to understand how containers are driving change for customers. Maybe what new tools you're providing to support this space? What about the Edge? Yeah, how real is that in terms of tangible pockets or patterns that you can identify that require new types of capabilities that you're delivering? Maybe you can help us unpack that a little bit. >> Okay so, I think there's two ways to look at containers, right? So the first is how are we utilizing the container technology itself, right? So containers are a package, right? So the amount of work we've been doing as Ansible's become more successful in the last couple of years, separating content out with Ansible collections. The ability to bring back manage, control a containerized runtime of Ansible so that you can lifecycle it, you can deploy it, it becomes portable. Edge is important there. How do I make sure I have the same automation running in the data center as the same automation running out on the Edge, if I'm looking at something that needs to be identical. The portability that the packaging of the container gives us, is a fantastic advantage, given you need to bring together just that automation you want. Smaller footprint, more refined footprint, lifecycle manage footprint. But at the same time, containers are also a very useful way of scaling the operation, right? And so as red hat puts things like Open Shift out in all these different locations, how can we leverage those platforms, to push the runtime of Ansible, the execution component, the execution plane of Ansible. How into anywhere that's hospitable for it to run? And as you move out towards Edge, as you move further away from the data center, you need a more ubiquitous sort of like run-time plane that you can put these things on. So they can just spin up when as, and when you need to. Potentially even at the end, actually being on the device, because at the same time with Edge, you also have different limits around how Edge works. It's not just about, hey I'm wifi points in an NFL stadium, actually, you're talking about I'm at the end of a 2000 mile, you know, piece of cable on an oil pipeline or potentially I'm a refinery out in the Gulf of Mexico. You know, you've got a very different dynamic to how you interact with that end point, than you do when it's a nice big controlled network, you know, powered location, which is well-governed and well-orchestrated. >> That's good. Thank you Rich. So Tom, think about automation, you know, back in the day, seems like a long time ago, but it really wasn't, automation used to scare some IT folks, because you know, sometimes it created unintended consequences or maybe it was a cultural thing and that you didn't want to automate themselves out of a job, but regardless. The cloud has changed that mindset, you know, showing us what's possible. You guys obviously had a big role in that, and the pandemic and digital initiatives, they really have made I call it the automation mandate. It was like the fourth March to digital, at least that's how I see it. I wonder if you could talk about, how you see your users approaching automation in as it relates to their business goals. Do you think automation is still being treated sometimes with trepidation or as a side project for some organizations or is it really continuing to evolve as a mainstream business imperative? >> Yes, so Dave we see it continuing to evolve as a strategic imperative for our customers. I mean, you'll, hear some of the keynote folks that are speaking here today. I've done an interview or doing an interview with Joe Mills from Discover, talking about extreme automation throughout Discovers organization. You'll hear representatives from JPMC talk about 22,000 JPMC employees contributing automation content in their environment, across 20 or 22 countries. I mean, just think about that scale, and the number of people that are involved in automation now and their tasks. So I think it's, I think we are, we have moved beyond or are moving beyond that idea that automation is just there to replace people's jobs. And it's much more about automation replacing the mundane, increasing consistency, increasing security, increasing agility, and giving people an opportunity to do more and more interesting stuff. So that's what we hear from our customers, this idea of them building. And it's not just the technology piece, but it's the cultural piece inside organizations where they're building these guilds or communities of practice, bringing people together to share best practices and experience with automation, so that they can feel comfortable learning from others and sharing with others and driving the organization forward. So we see a lot of that, and you'll hear a lot of that, at some of the Ansible Fest sessions this week. >> Well, I mean though I think that's a really important point. The last point you made about the skills, because I think you're right. I think we have moved beyond it's just job replacement. I don't know anybody who loves provisioning LUNs and say, oh, I'm the best in the world at that. It's just kind of something that was maybe important 10, 15, 20 years ago, but today, he should let the machines do that. So that's the whole skills transformation, is obviously a big part of digital transformation. Isn't it? >> It absolutely is. And frankly, we still hear, it's an impediment, that skills shortages are still an impediment to our customer success. They are still skilling up. I mean, honestly, that's one of the differentiators, for Ansible, as a language, a human readable language, that is easy to learn, easy to use, easy to share across an organization. So that's why you see job boards, and whatnot with so many opportunities that require or, or ask for Ansible skills out there. It's just a, it's become sort of a ubiquitous automation language in organizations, because it can be shared across lots of different roles. You don't have to be a Ruby software developer or a Python software developer to create automation with Ansible. You can be Tom Anderson or Rich Henshall. You don't have to, you don't have to be the, you know, the, the sharpest software developer in the world to take advantage of it. So anyway, that's one of the things that kind of overcoming some of the skills apprehension and bringing people into this, into the kind of new environment, of thinking about automation as code, not software code, but thinking of it like code. >> Got it. Guys we've got to leave it there, but Rich, how about you bring us home. We'll give you the last word. >> I mean, I think, you know what Tom just said there I think, about the skills side of things, is I think that the part that made it resonates the most. I mean I was a customer before I joined Red Hat, and trying to get large numbers of people, onto a same path, to try and achieve that outbound objective, that an organization has. The objective of an organization is not to automate, it's to achieve what is needed by what the automation facilitates. So how do we get those different groups to go from, Hey, this is about me, to this is actually about what we're trying to achieve as a business what we're trying to facilitate as a business, and how do we get those people easier access, a reduced barrier of entry to the skills they need to help make that successful, that compliments what they do, in their primary role, with a really strong secondary skill set that helps them do all the bits and pieces they need to do to make that job work. >> That's great, I mean you guys have done a great job, I mean it wasn't clear, you know, decade ago, or maybe half a decade ago, who was going to win this battle. Ansible clearly has market momentum and has become the leader. So guys congratulations on that and good job. Keep it going. I really appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. Thanks. >> Okay. This is the cubes, continuous coverage of Ansible Fest, 2021. Keep it right there for more content that educates and inspires. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(bright intro music) >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE coverage of AnsibleFest 2021, virtual, hybrid, all online now. It's been a hell of a year. It's been going great with all the interactions. AnsibleFest 2021, Carol Chen is here. She's the Principal Community Architect for Ansible Community with Red Hat. Carol, thanks for coming on the AnsibleFest 2021 virtual coverage. >> Thanks for having me here, John. >> You know, one of the things about the pandemic I was mentioning, there's the online communities have been really, that have been online, have thrived. Developers know how to do virtual, and virtual, first, now is becoming a norm for developers. So the pandemic, although it's been a really big inconvenience for many, developers, actually, haven't been truly impacted other than the face to face interactions around hallway conversations and events. You're seeing a lot more community open conversations happening more than ever before, just the trend itself was hot. Now you have more people collaborating. What's the state of the Ansible Community right now? Because you know, online content at an all-time high, I'm seeing videos hit. I've seen a lot of content flowing. All around the internet seems to be more action. What's the state of the Ansible Community? >> Yeah, definitely. And actually, from the very start Ansible Community is a very much online community because of the diverse nature in terms of, you know, geographical distribution and just people from all of the world coming together. So initially, I mean, of course we do have like in-person meet-ups, which were a popular thing before the pandemic. That kind of took a little backseat and while it turned virtual, initially, people were like wondering what to do, but, you know, we are used to video conferences and online chats. So virtual meet-ups became quite a popular thing in the first half of the pandemic. So pretty much most of last year, we actually saw a slight rise in the number of, the median number of attendees at these meet-ups, because it's more accessible. You can attend from home, you can, you know, you don't have to go to a physical place to attend these meet-ups. However, this year we are starting to see some virtual fatigue and, you know, the numbers are dropping a little bit, but, you know, hopefully with the, some parts of the world are opening up and we are seeing some meet-ups coming into, in person again, depending on the region, of course, because it's not the same around the world. But I think that the need for people to connect socially is always there, whether it's online or in person. And the Ansible Community is pretty strong in that. And I want to stress that a lot of these meet-ups are organized by the community members, not necessarily by Red Hat or the Ansible team. So, you know, the desire to connect with other people in the community has always there and it's going on strong. >> Yeah, that's a good call out on the community side. I think that the affinity groups around the communities, self forming these meet-ups. >> Right. >> People want to meet in person, that's going to come back. You're starting to see that hybrid. But it's also, you're starting to see again, a fatigue for being like attending these virtual events. But at the same time, you're seeing the asynchronous consumption still go high, too. You're seeing, "Okay, I can do a fly by the event." Or if it's in person, "I'd prefer that." But there's still a lot more asynchronous going on, and a lot more opportunities to contribute. And you guys have done this contributor summits virtually. Can you talk about that trend? Tell me about the virtual contributor summits. >> Sure. So of course we have our regular community meetings, weekly, in fact. But the contributor summit is a place where we can actually gather, previously it was face-to-face, usually part of AnsibleFest, like the day before or after, depending. And, you know, to really, you know, hash out different discussions and more in-depth technical analyses of different parts of the project that we were working on. Even though, virtually, we are still able to do that, and we are, actually, able to increase in frequency of these events. Usually, it used to be once or twice a year, depending on whether or not we have, when we have the AnsibleFest. But last year we had three contributors summits. And this year, the third one will happen along with AnsibleFest in September, end of September, so in this week. So yeah, you know, there's definitely the advantage of making things easier to, for participants. But um... >> Talk about the vibe- Talk about the vibe of the summit. I mean, these contributors. I mean, what's it like and what are people experiencing? Are they just contributing code? They working on projects? Is it hackathons? Is it more, >> Right. >> What's the format of, what are people preferring? What's the best practice? >> So, what we want to encourage is not just one person giving presentations and like a one-way thing, but actually a dialogue. So a lot of these discussions are kind of interactive. So we use tools that allow people, not just like streaming one direction, but people can also appear on video and talk and express their opinions and join the discussions or in chat if they prefer not to show their face. But in any case, it's a lot of times it's not a full presentation, but perhaps an introduction for 5, 10 minutes. And then we go to discussion of a certain topic in-depth. So it's a very, I would say discussion-based, and also we are introducing a hackathon at this contributor summit, because I think it's quite a popular thing for people to get hands-on experience or work on something right away with people to support them then and there. So, you know, you can get results in real-time. So in actual fact, even before the pandemic, our contributor summits have had like, a virtual online component. So we were doing hybrid events before they were, you know, called popular hybrid events, but... >> Before they were necessary, it was cool. >> Right, Right. Exactly. So, because like I said, our contributors are from around the world, so we always made sure that they had a way of participating in the contributor summit as well. >> Yeah. I think that's really important to point out. I mean, I won't say it's cool to do hybrids necessary now because of the pandemic, but that format actually is interesting because you got a linear event that's physical face to face. Certainly that's super valuable when that comes back. But now that the online side has kind of been tied together with the simulated live asynchronous capability, you have this new format. Talk about how you guys are taking that to the next level around trust. Because one of the things about being face-to-face and then being online and knowing people is working together and getting a feeling of trusting each other, right? So, this is a- >> Right. huge part of community. >> How are you guys, now that we're more dispersed than ever, how are you guys handling, or facilitating and nurturing that trust equation? >> Right. So as a open source project, one of the key things is we do a lot of the things in the open. We, you know, the pull request, the development of the code is all done in the open. That's, you know, a very kind of implicit trust that you can have through that. And also the community meetings are open up to the public. Anybody can join if they're interested in. And even if you're not able to join the meetings because time zones or whatever, we share the meeting minutes after the meetings to everyone. Which brings me to, we actually started a newsletter for the community called the Bullhorn, since last April, I think. Because, you know, again, we are trying to explore more channels to be able to reach to different people who may not be able to attend in person, or even during the same time as the community meetings. So they can have this bi-weekly newsletter every two weeks that, you know, shares the meeting minutes. What has been discussed, the new developments in the community, the new collections, updates, new tools and so on. So definitely we see, like, we want to improve the communication to the community and ways that they can provide feedback to us as well. >> And that's called the Bullhorn? That's just getting the word out? >> Yeah, Bullhorn. Yes. Thank you. >> It's like the updates, like it's like, you know, a quick, quick executive summary of kind of what's happening. Is that kind of the vibe? >> Right, Right. >> Okay. Well, I want to ask you specifically, I heard about this new Community Steering Committee. What's the purpose of this? What's this evolving into? Can you give us some background on the purpose and the objective of the community? >> Yeah Sure. Yeah. We established the Ansible Community Steering Committee earlier this year, and as we were saying that the Ansible project is growing, so of course the user community, and also, they're very happy to say that the contributor community is growing. So, you know, we want to provide a better structure for the upstream Ansible project. And a lot of changes are taking place that we want to have some, a group of people to be able to facilitate that. For example, people are, want to make, create new collections, Ansible collections, for automated technologies that they are, you know, working on, or even contribute to existing collections that they have invested interest in. So what are some of the procedures and policies that are needed? Right? So the Steering Committee defines these procedures and make sure that the new content coming in are in compliance to the policies and so on. I mean, this kind of decision-making and stuff has been happening in the committee, I mean the community in an ad hoc manner, to a large extent, even before this. But having the Steering Committee will provide, to add more structure, like I said, and also guidance and accountability for the Ansible Community. >> That's awesome. You know, I love, first of all, I love your title, Principal Community Architect. And you know, one of the things I've always been a big fan of with Ansible, and now as part of Red Hat, is one, Red Hat didn't screw up Ansible. They let it become what it was and became really big with the combination. But the community has always been content driven. And now you've got recipes, you've got collections, you've got content, but the community piece is key. And right now, more than ever with the pandemic, community is more important than ever before. Open source is more important than ever before. How do you look at the architecture of how to sustain and evolve communities to be more inclusive and to grow and to survive and thrive post pandemic? What's your learnings? What's your vision on architecting community for the future? >> I think the key thing is to really find channels and ways to listen to the community. We talk about how to reach our newsletter or whatever, meetings to the community, but it's also what's coming from them. If we don't listen to what they have to say, we don't know what they want and how we can make the community better, the process better for them. I mean, I've been managing different open source communities before Ansible, but every community is different, right? I cannot say what worked for the previous community works for this. So I always try to reach out to the current members in the Ansible Community and hear what they have to say, their complaints, their criticisms, good and bad, because, you know, without those feedback, we cannot grow and we cannot improve. So, and I myself, I've lived in three different continents. So I know the struggle of whether it's like language barriers or time zone restrictions. So, you know, we keep all these in mind as we, you know, build our relationships with the community. >> And I think there's, I think there's a real opportunity with this new virtual standards that not yet emerged. I mean, you mentioned you've been doing hybrid, which has always been part of a physical event, which is going to become normal. But I think there's an opportunity that we're learning in this past a year and a half, where there are new, there are new things and there's, it's good, bad and ugly. I mean, there's been some really ugly conferences. Virtual's a bit painful. But there's also been some really nice moments where people are seeing interaction. So is there any learnings that you've taken away from this past year and a half that you can point to that you might want to share with folks watching around how to tap into the magical moments that could be enabled by, you know, the virtual and or bringing people together? >> You know, I myself, I'm a lover of technology, anything new I like to try. So definitely in this pandemic there's been lots of opportunities to try different technologies. What works, what doesn't work. I think, you know, just trying things out helps. I know sometimes people are resistant to change. I myself sometimes find it hard to change my ways in, in certain, you know, I'm used to this too. I want to use it most of the time, but. But anyway, you know, give, things a chance, but most, I think most importantly, is focus on the people. Because technology aside, it is the people you are reaching out to. Right? So again, listen what they have to say. You know? If this doesn't work for them, find out what they prefer, or you know, what, how we can make things better to improve things for them. So I always keep the focus on the people, on the community and, you know, give new technology a chance. And you know sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't, but you don't know 'til try and yeah, just- >> Jump in the water is warm. >> Hope for the best. >> Come on in, water is fine. So the meet-ups are happening. >> Right. >> People are getting together where there, where there's a geography opportunity where there's not a lot of scaring, too much scare going on with the meet-ups. So that's cool. What, what is the current AnsibleFest 2021 key thing that you'd like people to walk away with Carol? Because obviously the momentum is continuing. The world needs to go on. We are seeing hybrid, and then we're going to end up coming out of this soon. What's the, what's the key message this year from the AnsibleFest 2021, from the community. >> That, Ansible is open, Ansible is, you know, open to contributions from anyone. And especially the Ansible Community team is working very hard to make things easy and accessible. So please feel free to visit Ansible.com/community for ways of reaching us. And, you know, use Ansible to automate your stuff, and then use the free time that you have from that to spend more time for your family and friends. >> That's great. Be open. Listen. Now you've got a Steering Committee to steer that ship in the right direction. Congratulations. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and for the update, really appreciate it. Again, props to the community at the Ansible part of Red Hat. You guys do a great job. And again, we'll see you on the other side of the pandemic and thanks for coming in remotely all the way in Finland. >> Thank you so much for having me. Its been my pleasure. Thanks. >> Thank you, Carol. I'm John Furrier for AnsibleFest 2021 coverage. This is theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (bright exit music)

(cheerful music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of AnsibleFest 2021, with Red Hat. Topic of this power panel is the future of automation, we've got a great lineup of CUBE alumni, Joe Fitzgerald, vice president, general manager of the Red Hat business unit, thanks for coming on, Tom Anderson, vice president, product manager of Red Hat, and Alessandro Perilli, the senior director of product market at Red, all good CUBE alumni. Distinct power panel, Joe we'll start out with you, what have you seen in automation game right now, 'cause it continues to evolve. I mean you can't go to an event, a virtual event, or read anything online without hearing AI automation, automation hybrid, automation hybrid hybrid hybrid hybrid, I mean automation is the top conversation in almost all verticals. What do you see happening right now? >> Yeah, it's sort of amazing, you know? Automation is quite fashionable these days, as you pointed out. Automation's always been on the radar of a lot of enterprises, and I think it was always perceived as sort of like that, an efficiency, a task model thing, that people did. Now automation is, if you believe some of the analysts, it's up to a board room imperative in some cases. So we are seeing with our customers that the level of complexity they're dealing with, particularly exaggerated by what's gone past year and a half in the world, is putting a tremendous amount of pressure, attention and importance on automation. So automation's definitely one of the busiest places to be right now. >> What's the big change this year, though? I mean we love the automation conversation, we had it last year a lot too, as well. What's the change, what's the trend right now that's driving this next level automation conversation with customers? >> Well, I'll ask my colleagues to comment on that in a second, but, the challenges here with automation, is people are constrained now, they can't access facilities as easy as they used to be able to. They still need to go fast, some businesses have had to expand dramatically, and introduce new services to handle all sorts of new scenarios, they've had to deploy things faster. Security, not a week goes by you don't read about something going on regarding security and breaches and hacking and things like that, so they're trying to secure things as fast as possible, right, and deploy critical fixes and patches and things like that. So there's just tremendous amount of activity, that's really been exaggerated by what's gone on over the past year. >> And all of this is being compounded with a nature of increasing complexity, that we're seeing in the architecture, explosion microservices, the adoption en masse of containers, and the adoption of multiple clouds for most customers around the world. So really, the extension of the IT environment, especially for large enterprises, enormous for any team, no matter how big it is, so how scale it is, to really go after and look for all the systems, and then the complexity of the architectures, is enormous within that IT environment. It is impossible to scale the applications and to scale the infrastructure, and not scale the IT operations. And so automation becomes really a way to scale IT operations, rather than just keep repeating the same steps over and over, in an attempt to simplify, or to reduce costs. It's well beyond that at this point. >> That's a great point. Tom, what's your reaction to this, because Alessandro brings up a good point, developers are going faster than ever before. The changes of speed and complexity have gone up, so the demand for the IT and/or security groups, or anyone, to be faster, not weeks, minutes. We're talking about a complete time shift here. >> Yeah, so I talk to a lot of customers, and what I keep hearing again and again from them is kind of two things, which is, a need for skills, and reskilling existing staff. When Alessandro talks about the complexity and the scale, think about all the different new tools, new environments, new platforms that these employees and these associates are being exposed to and expected to be able to handle. So, a real, not a skill shortage, but a stress on the skills of the organization. And then secondly, really, our customers are talking to us about the culture in the environment itself, the culture of collaboration, the culture of automation, and the kind of impact that has in our organization, the way teams are now expected to work together, to share information, to share automation, to push, you know, we talk about shifting left in a lot of things now in IT, automation is now shifting left, pushing automation and access to subsystems, IT subsystems and resources, into the hands of people who traditionally haven't had direct access to those resources. So really kind of shift in skills, and a shift in culture I see. >> Ah, the culture. (indistinct), I want to come back to that culture thing, but I want to ask you specifically on that point, do you think automation users still view automation as just repeating and simplifying processes that they already are doing? You've heard the term, "Done it three times, automate it." Is that definition changing and evolving, what's your thoughts? >> Yeah, IT is really changing, going from the traditional, "I'm a network engineer and I use a command line to update my devices I'm responsible for, the config devices, and then I decide to write a playbook using a really cool product like Ansible to drive automation into my daily tasks." And then it comes up to exposing, again, exposing that subsystem I'm responsible for, whatever it is, storage, network, compute, whatever it is, exposing that op so other people can consume it without me being involved, right? So that's a real change in a mindset, and tooling, and approach, that I'm going to expose that op to a set of workflows, business workflows, that drive automation throughout an organization. So that's a real kind of evolution of automation, (indistinct) first, and that's usually focused mostly on day zero, provisioning of a new service. Now we see a lot more focus, or a lot of additional focus on day two operations. How do I automate my day two operations to make them a lot more efficient, as my scale and complexity grows? How do I take the human element out of operating this on a day to day basis? >> So you're saying basically, if I understand you correctly, the system's architecture view, or mindset, around automation, it moves from "Hey, I'm going to use," and Ansible by the way is great for "Hey, I want to automate something, I'm doing a lot," that's cool. But you're looking at it differently. If I understand you correctly, you're saying the automation has to be a system view, meaning you create the rules of the road so that automation can happen at the front lines of the CICD pipeline. You mentioned shift left, is that the difference, is that kind of what's happening here, that's beyond just doing automation, because you can automate it, so you've done that, this is like the next level, is that what you're getting at? >> It is, and we joke about it a little bit, crushing silos, right? Breaking down silos, and again, I keep talking about culture, it really is important, tools are important and technology's important, but the culture's super important, and trying to think of that thing from a systems mindset, of sort of workflows and orchestration of a business process that touches IT components, and how do I automate that and expose that to that workflow, without a human having to touch it, right? Yet still enforce my security protocols, my performance expectations, my compliance stuff, all of that stuff still needs to be enforced, and that's where repeatable automation comes in, of being able to expose this stuff up into these system-level workflows. >> And then there is another element to this (indistinct), I think it's really important to attach to this, the element of speed. We talk about complexity, we talk about scale, but then there is this emerging third dimension, as I call it, that is the speed. And the speed has a number of different articulation, it's the speed when you're thinking about how quickly you need to deliver the application. If you're in a very competitive environment, think about web scale startups for example, or companies in an emerging market, and then you have the speed in terms of reacting to a cybersecurity attack, which Tom just mentioned. And then you have the third kind of speed I'm thinking about right now, which is the increasing amount of artificial intelligence, so an algorithmic kind of operation that is taking place in the organization. For now it's still very limited, but it's not unthinkable that going forward, the operations will be driven, or at least assisted by artificial intelligence. This speed, just like the scale and the complexity we mentioned before, are impossible to be addressed by a single team, and so automation becomes indispensable. >> Yeah, that's a great point, I want to just double click on that, I mean both Tom and Joe were just talking about system, they used the word system. In a subsystem, if one is going faster than the other, to your point, there's a bottleneck there. So if the IT group or security groups are going to take time to approve things, they're not putting rules to the road together to automate and help developers be faster, because look, it's clear, we've been reporting on this in theCUBE, cloud developers are fast. They're moving really fast with code. And so what happens is, if they're going to shift left, that means they're going to be at the point of coding to set policies on security. So, that's going to put pressure on the other subsystems to go faster, so they have to then expose rules of the road, or I'm just making that up, but policy base, or have some systems thinking. They can't just be the old way of saying "No, slow it down." So this is a cultural thing, I think Joe, you brought up culture, Alessandro, you brought up culture. Is that still there? That speed, fast team here and a slow team here? Is that still around, or people getting faster on both sides? And I'm kind of talking about IT, generally speaking, they tend to be slower than the developers. >> Well, just a couple comments, first of all, you heard silos, you heard complexity, you heard speed, talked about shift left. Let me sort of maybe tie those together, right? What's happened to date is every silo has their own set of tooling, right? And so one silo might move very fast, with a very private set of tools, or network management, or security, or whatever, right? And if you think about it, one of the number one skills gaps right now is for automation people. But if an automation person has to learn 17 different tools, 'cause I'm running on three public clouds, I'm on-premise, edge, and I'm doing things to move network storage, compute, security, all sorts of different systems, the tooling is so complicated, right, that I end up with a bunch of specialists. Which can only do one or two things, because they don't know the other domains and they don't know the skills. One of the things we've seen from our customers, I think this is a fundamental shift in automation, is that what we've done with Ansible in particular is, we actually adopted Ansible because of its simplicity. It's actually human-readable, you don't have to be a hardcore programmer to write automation. So that allows the emergence of citizen creators of automation. There's not like a group in some ivory tower that now can make automation and they do it for the masses. Individuals can now use Ansible to create automation. Going cross-domain, Ansible automation touches networks, security, storage, compute, cloud, edge, Linux, Windows, containers, traditional, ITSM, it touches so many systems, that basically what you have is you have a set of power tooling, in Ansible, that allows you now to share automation across teams, 'cause they speak the same language, right? And that's how you go faster. If every silo is fast, but when you have to go inter-silo you slow down, or have to open a ticket, or have some (indistinct) mismatch, it causes delays, errors, and exposures. >> I think that is a very key point, I mean that delay of opening up tickets, not being responsive, Alessandro, you put up machine learning and AI, I mean if you think about what that could do from an automation standpoint, if you can publish the HIPAA rules for your healthcare, you can just traverse that with a bot, right? I mean this is the new... This just saves so much time, why even open up a ticket? So if you can shift left and do the security, and there's kind of rules there, this is a trend, how do you make that happen, how do you bust the silos, and I guess that's the question I'd love to get everyone to react to, because that implies some sort of horizontally scalable control plane. How does someone do that in an architectural way, that doesn't really kind of, maybe break everything, or make the (indistinct) go into a cultural sideways situation? >> Maybe I can jump in, and grab this one, and then maybe ask Alessandro to weigh in afterwards, but, what we've seen and what you'll see some of the speakers at AnsibleFest this year talk about, from a cultural perspective is bringing teams together across automation guilds, JPMC calls it a community of practice, where they're bringing hundreds and thousands of individuals in the organization together virtually, into these teams that share best practices, and processes and automation that they've created. Secondly, and this is a little bit of a shameless plug for Ansible, which is having a common language, a common automation language across these teams, so that sharing becomes obviously a lot easier when you're using the same language. And then thirdly, what we see a lot now is people treating automation as code. Storing that, and get version managing and version controlling and checking in, checking out, really thinking of automation differently from an individual writing a script, to this being infrastructure or whatever my subsystem is, managed it and automated it as code, and thinking of themselves as people responsible for code. >> These are all great points. I think that on top of all these things, there is an additional element which is change management. You cannot count on technology alone to change something that is purely cultural, as we kept saying during this video right now. So, I believe that a key element to win, to succeed in an automation project, is to couple the technology, great technology, easy to understand, able to become the common language as Tom just said, with an effort in change management that starts from the top. It's something you don't see very often because a technology vendor rarely works with a more consulting firm, but it's definitely an area that I think would be very interesting to explore for our customers. >> That's a great point on the change management, but let me ask you, what do you think it needs to make automation more frictionless for users, what do you see that needs to happen, Alessandro? >> I think there are at least a couple of elements that need to change. The first one is that, the effort that we're seeing right now in the industry, to further democratize the capability to automate has to go one notch further. And by that I mean, implementing cell service provisioning portals and ways for automatically execute an automation workflow that already exists, so that an end user, somebody that works in the line of business, and doesn't understand necessarily what the automation workflow, the script is doing, still able to use it, to consume it when it, she or he needs to use it. This is the first element, and then the second element that is definitely more ambitious, is about the language, about how do I actually write the automation workflow? This is a key problem. It's true that some automation engines and some workflows have done, historically speaking, a better job than others, in simplifying the way we write automation workflows, and definitely this is much simpler than writing code with a programming language, and it's simpler than writing automation compared to a tool that we use 10, 15 years ago. But still, there is a certain amount of complexity, because you need to understand how to write in a way that the automation framework understands, and you need even before that, you need to express what you want to achieve, and in a way that the automation engine understands. So, I'm thinking that going forward we'll start to see artificial intelligence being applied to this problem, in a way that's very similar to what OpenAI Microsoft are doing with Codex, the capability that is a model that allows a person to write in plain English through a comment in code, to translate that comment into actual code, taken from GitHub or through the machine learning process that's been done. I'm really thinking that going forward, we will start to see some effort in the same direction, but applied to automation. What if the AI could assist us, not replace us, in writing the automation workflow so that more people are capable to translating what they want to achieve, in a way that is automatable? >> So you're saying the language, making it easy to program, or write, or create. Being a creator of automation. And then having that be available as code, with other code, so there's kind of this new paradigm of automating the automation. >> In a sense, this is absolutely true, yes. >> In addition to that, John, I think there's another dimension here which is often overlooked, which we do spend a lot of time on. It's one thing to have things like Alessandro mentioned, that are front edge in terms of helping you write code, but you want to know something? In big organizations, a lot of times what we find is, someone's already written the code that you need. You know what the problem is? You don't know about it, you can't find it, you can't share it and you can't collaborate on it, so the best code is something that somebody's already invested the time to write, test, burn in, certify, what if they could share it, and what if people could find it, and then reuse it? Right, everybody's talking about low code, no code, well, reuse is the best, right? Because you've already invested expertise into doing it. So we've spent a lot of time working with our customers based on their feedback, on building the tools necessary for them to share automation, to collaborate on it, certify it, and also to create that supply chain from partners who create integrations and interfaces to their systems, and to be able to share that content through the supply chain out to our customers and have them be able to share automation across very large globally distributed organizations. Very powerful. >> That's a powerful point, I mean reuse, leverage there, is phenomenal. Discovery engine's got to be built. You got to know, I mean someone's got to build a search engine for the code. "Hey code, who's written some code?" But just a whole 'nother mindset, so this brings up my next question for you guys, 'cause this is really, we're teasing out the biggest things coming next in automation. These are all great points, they're all about the future, where will the puck be, let's skate to where the puck will be, but it's computer science and automation that's being democratized and opened up more, so it's, what do you guys think is the biggest thing coming next for automation? >> Joe, you want to go next? >> Sure. Sure. Yeah, I'll take it. So we're getting a glimpse of that with a number of customers right now that we're working with that are doing things around concepts like self-healing infrastructures. Well what the heck is that? Basically, it's tying event systems, and AI, which is looking at what's going on in an environment, and deciding that something is broken, sub-optimal, spending too much, there's some issue that needs to be dealt with. In the old days, it was, that system would stop with opening a ticket, dispatch some people who were either manually or semi-automated go fix their whatever. Now people are connecting these systems and saying "Wait a minute. I've got all this rich data coming through my eventing systems. I can make some sense out of it with AI or machine learning. Then I can drive automation, I just eliminated a whole bunch of people, time, exposure, cost, everything else." So I think that, sort of a ventureman automation is going to be huge. I'm going to argue that every single system in the world that uses AI, the result of that's going to be, I want to go do something, I want to change, optimize my move, secure, stop, start, relocate, how's that going to get done? It's going to get done with automation. >> And what Joe just said is really highly successful in the consumer space. If you think about solutions like If This Then That, or Zapier for example, those are examples of event-driven automation. They've been in the consumer space for a long time, and they are wildly popular to the point that there are dozens of clones and competitors. The enterprise space, it didn't adopt the same approach so far, but we start to see event bridges, and event hubs that can really help with this. And this really connects to the previous point, at this point I'm a broken record, which is about the speed and the complexity. If the environment is so spread out, so complex, and it goes all the way to the edge, and all these events take place at a neck-breaking pace, the only way for you is to tie the automation workflows that you have written, to a trigger, an event that takes place at some point, according to your logic. >> Tom, what are your thoughts? >> Yeah, last but not least on that kind of thread, which is sort of the architectures as we get out to the edge, what does it take to automate things at the edge? We thought there was a big jump from data center to cloud, and now when you start extending that out to the edge, am I going to need a new automation platform to handle those edge devices? Will I need a new language, will I need a new team, or can I connect these things together using a common platform to develop the automate at the edge? And I think that's where we see some of our customers moving now, which is automating those edge environments which have become critical to their business. >> Awesome, I want to ask one final question while I've got you guys here in this power panel, great insights here. Operational complexity was mentioned, skills gap was mentioned earlier, I want to ask you guys about the organizational behavior and dynamic going on with this change. Automation, hybrid, multi-cloud, all happening. When you start getting into speed of application development for the modern app, opensource where things are opening up and things are going to be democratized with automation and code and writing automation, and scaling that, you're going to have a cultural battle that's happening, and we're kind of seeing it play out in real time. DevOps has kind of gone and been successful, and we're seeing cloud-native bring new innovation, people are refactoring their business models with cloud technologies, now the edge is here, so this idea of speed, shifting left, from a developer standpoint, is putting pressure on the old, incumbent systems, like the security group, or the IT group that's still holding onto their ticketing system, and they're slower, they're getting requests, and the developer's like "Okay, go faster, I want this done faster." So we're seeing departments reorganizing. What do you guys see, 'cause Red Hat, you guys have been in there, all these big accounts for the generation of this modern era. What's the cultural dynamics happening, and what can companies do to be successful, to get to the next level? >> So I think for us, John, we certainly see it and we experience it, across thousands of customers, and what we've done as an organization is put together adoption journeys, a consulting engagement for our customers around an automation adoption journey, and that isn't just about the technology, it's all throughout that technology, it's about those cultural things, thinking differently about the way I automate and the way I share, and the way I do these tasks. So it's as much about cultural and process as it is about technology. And our customers are asking us for that help. Red Hat, you have thousands of customers that are using this product, surely you can come and tell us how we can achieve more with automation, how can we break down these silos, how can we move faster, and so we've put together these offerings, both directly as well as with our partners, to try and help these customers kind of get over that cultural hump. >> Awesome. Anyone else want to react to the cultural shift and dynamics and how it can play out in a positive way? >> Yeah, I think that it's a huge issue. We always talk about people, processes, and technology. Well the people issue's a really big deal here. We're seeing customers, huge organizations, with really capable teams building apps and services and infrastructures, saying "Help me think about automation in a new way." The old days, it was "Hey, I'm thinking about it as a cost savings thing." Yeah, there's still cost savings in there. To your point, John, now they're talking about speed, and security, and things like that. How fast, zero day exploits, now it's like zero hour exploits. How fast can I think about securing something? You know, time to heal, time to secure, time to optimize, so people are asking us, "What are the best practices? What is the best way to look at what I've got, my automation deficits," used to have tech deficits, now you got automation deficits, right? "What do I need to do culturally?" It's very similar to what happened with DevOps, right? Getting teams to get together and think about it differently and holistically, that same sort of transition is happening, and we're helping customers do that, 'cause we're talking to a lot of them where you've got the scholars have been through it. >> Awesome. Alessandro, your thoughts on this issue. >> I think that what Tom and Joe just said is going to further aggravate, it's going to happen more and more going forward, and there is a reason for that. And this connects back with the skill problem, that we discussed before. In the last 10 years, I've seen growing demand for developers to become experts in a lot of areas that have nothing to do with development, code development. They had to become experts in cloud infrastructures, they had to become experts in security because, you've probably heard this many times, security's everybody's responsibility. Now they've been asked to become experts in artificial intelligence, transforming their title into something like ML engineer. The amount of skills and disciplines that they need to master, alone, by themself, would require a lifetime of work. And we're asking human beings to get better and better at all of these things, and all of the best practice. It's absolutely impossible. And so the only way for them, yeah, five jobs in one, six jobs in one, right? Probably for the same seller, and the only way that these people can execute the best practice, enforce the best practice, if the best practices are encoded in automation workflow, not necessarily written by them, but by somebody else, and execute them at the right time, the right context, and for the right reason. >> It's like the five tool player in baseball, you got to do five different things, I mean this is, you got to do AI, you got to do machine learning, you got to have access to all the data, you got to do all these different things. This is the future of automation, and automation's critical. I've never heard that term, automation deficit or automation debt, we used to talk about tech debt, but I think automation is so important because the only way to go fast is to have automation, kind of at the center of it. This is a huge, huge topic. Thank you very much for coming on, power panel on the future of automation, Joe, Tom, Alessandro from Red Hat, thanks for coming on, everyone, really appreciate the insight, great conversation. >> Thanks, John. >> 'Kay, this is theCUBE's coverage of AnsibleFest 2021 virtual. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, your host, thanks for watching. (calm music)

>> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AnsibleFest 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host. Got two great guests here. Dave Lindquist Vice President of Software Engineering at Red Hat and Matthew Jones, Chief Architect, and Ansible Engineer Architect of the automation platform. Matthew, great to see you, Dave, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on for the, for this CUBE conversation. >> Great to see you John, thank you. >> So the big theme here is automation, we've been talking about it for a while. Dave, I think last year we hit this point a couple of times hard. This year, it's kind of going mainstream and it's really exciting because like, this is stuff that's been kind of going around. So it's been growing rapidly. So building on the themes from last year, throughout this year and cloud native with the edge right around the corner, automation is growing rapidly. Okay, so what arenas do you guys think we're in the too hard, too easy, you know, comments like yeah, repetitive tasks are good, but it's more complicated than that now. Are there areas that your customers think are better for automation than others? Can you guys introduce where the action is? >> Sure. Well, I'll get started John. We are clearly seeing an acceleration at our applied automation across full life cycles, across domains. If you step back and think about the journey, many customers are on with their development environments, continuous delivery, inter-cloud, hybrid cloud. The challenges are how to accelerate the use of automation across the full life cycle, across your workloads, across security compliance, across networking, across storage, how to remediate situations. So it's just an acceleration of how do you apply automation into all these different domains? >> Is there areas specifically you think customers thought, no, we'll never going to get there that they're getting there now? Is there specific things you're seeing low-hanging fruit or is there a clear path? What do you guys see about that? Cause you know, this is now we're seeing things now that certainly with the pandemic, a lot more visibility into automation with cloud scale. Is there areas where your customers are saying I didn't think I can get that. Now we can get that. Now we can automate that. >> Yeah. I think a couple of areas jump to mind quickly. One is sometimes referred to as a shift left, but how do you start bringing automation earlier, earlier into the life cycle? One of the things we talked about last year that we've been building on is with advanced cluster management and containers and Kubernetes. And how do you insert automation from Ansible into all the different life cycles? Whether it's setting up clusters, it's deploying applications, it's remediating from security events or compliance activities that's, we're starting to see where customers are really starting to push the envelope on their use automation across those life cycles. >> Matt, how has Ansible evolving to address the demands we've heard in previous interviews with customers specifically to grow past their traditional management automation environments, because that's the real action here. What are you guys doing to address those demands? >> Yeah, you're, you're exactly right. Our, the way that we're evolving is in you know, right. Like we, where we've started as with basic command line tools, really basic integration with systems that developers have been familiar with for years, decades, right? Where we want to grow into is the native automation that makes up the cloud that makes up the services and infrastructure that not just developers interface with, but administrators, DevOps, SRE, common users, normal people who are just trying to get things done. We want to meet them at the systems and at the footprints that they expect. And that's what we want to do. And that the systems and the tools that we're introducing this year, next year, that we've been working on through the pandemic. So I'm moving the ball forward into those areas. >> W what's been along those lines, what's been the, the thought around footprint expansion. Cause that's become a big topic, right? I want to expand my automation space. I want to hire more people. Good luck with that. And it's hard to hire people in this market, but again, automation is, is a human machine and software perspective. So you still need humans. So footprint, automation and team scale. Can you talk about that, Matthew? What do you think about that? >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, we've spent a lot of time focusing on automation in the system space and how these tools connect to those systems and a big theme this year of AnsibleFest has been, how do we, how do we get back to the tools and the processes that people are using and people are building to do that. We've, we've created a whole developer focus space within the automation platform, a suite of tools that integrate into their development environments, their own automation workflows, making it easier to share and collaborate on automation, building communities within their organizations and among their, their internal stakeholders. And I think you'll see that represented here at AnsibleFest and the dedication to those tools and the integration of workloads and not just, not just the tools that they've had before, but the tools that they're learning and gaining experience with right now, the container based workloads and how do we share automation and verify and validate feel good about that automation that it's going to work when we go to production with it, those are the kinds of tools and processes that we're developing and delivering for our customers, for the community, for their stakeholders in their community also. >> What's the big updates this year at AnsibleFest for those people who want to jump in and make and have it be easier for teams to use Ansible and experienced Ansible. And also for the new, the newbies people coming in who are new to automation that could be savvy developers. I mean, people are shifting left with security and everyone's bolting on automation and, or planning it in from the beginning on architecture. So you're seeing a new, a new user base come in to answer well, that's what I hear. What, what specifically are you guys announcing? >> And those new people, they need to be able to come into an organization's process and get up to speed on what their automation, what automation they're working on and learn the ropes, be able to share and collaborate with people who are automating in this space already. We need to be able to give them access to documentation and tooling that helps them get started right away rather than having to fumble around the documentation, have meetings and learn the ropes. We want, we want to make the smooth and, and we want the pipeline of automation to go from the developer and their team into the content publisher publishing and management of automation hub using collections and execution environments that we're introducing here. The same things that they work on and build and produce as automation developers are what they'll use in the automation platform to actually run the automation. And that feels really good, right? The things that you're seeing on your developer workspace that you share with your team and your internal community, you can follow it right through your editor, your ID, through to automation hub. You're going to proving the content right out through automation controller and the automation platform through running that automation. >> Yeah, I think this is a huge point. I mean, Matthew nailed it. I think you have to have the, the ability to go from newbie accelerate quickly to expert because you know, this is the cloud that's cloud scale. There's the life cycle of software development is changing. It's very agile. It's very integrated and newbies can come in quickly and be awesome fast. It's not, you don't need to go to the training old school kind of training modules and get ramped up. You could be instantly running hard. So I think that's a huge point. And we're hearing that. So congratulations. Dave, I want to bring you in and talk about the, how other Ansible adjacent systems that you oversee come together with this release of Ansible. So, so what does it mean for the products okay. That are working together in the management space, because you know, you now have Ansible great track record. Now you have a system in these distributed systems now, enterprising cloud environments or systems working together. What's the impact. >> Yeah, no great question, John, maybe just to start to follow on some of the areas that Matthew was going through, some of the advances in Ansible automation platform are really to ease the deployment and then be able to grow that deployment with scale and distribution, putting execution nodes, wherever you, wherever those nodes need to be the ability to simplify, creating content, access to content collections so that the automation maturity and the use automation can grow. So that couples very nice with many of the investments we have in the broader space of, of management around advanced cluster management for Kubernetes, with ACM around, around our insights, around our edge management initiatives across, across the board. So what I'm seeing, what we're all seeing is how many of the solutions are looking at how you bring many of these disciplines to Garret together. For example, how do we start realizing the promise of event driven architectures from insights? How can we understand what's happening with workloads or infrastructure or compliance issues? And then from the management systems, we can pick up the inventory and the workload and all the specifics about that workload. And then with Ansible, we can then automate and remediate either scale that workload address a, you know, your, your service management processes or hook into even remediation say of a compliance issue. So you're basically bringing together insights with policy, during mechanisms with the automation capabilities of Ansible, which is fascinating and how we start building much more robust automation solutions. Which are required where everything's headed in this hybrid cloud environment. >> I mean, what are some of the challenges that your customers have on that point? There's robust solutions are what everyone wants. It's a natural extension. I mean, you can see what you just laid out. What, what are some of the customer challenges, data that you're seeing there, because this is a path everyone's going down, I'm hearing people discuss this, you know, in the hallways and virtual hallways these days. But you know, for the most part, like, okay, I, I know what I know. I love what I have. I got to start connecting these other adjacent systems together and make them work and automate together. What's the biggest challenge is, is it culture? Is it blockers? Or what's the, or that evolution, maybe you can weigh in too, if you want, this is, this is the key question that everyone's asking. >> Yeah, it's a, it's a key question. And these challenges have been around for some time. One of the, one of the more complex things always in maturing, the use of automation is the interaction with a lot of the existing processes that teams use, which are usually focused on particular domains. So many of the areas that we've been talking about automating the full, the fuller lifecycle is you're actually cutting across the domains and intersecting integrating with many of, many of the processes. So how do you allow the customer to incrementally evolve the automation of these processes across the domains, which brings in identity and access and authorization. It brings in visibility into the resources and the applications and the dependencies. And then of course the wealth of automation, the collections and the playbooks, essentially the content. How do you bring the content together? So the challenges are how do you allow the collaboration across the processes. How do you accelerate access to the content? And then how do you have a level of control to grow identity and access and authentication systems? >> That's awesome. Matthew, what's your reaction on this? Because I mean, you architected the system and you have to envision it working in the future as a lot of headroom involved in this area a lot of automation, what's the blockers? And what's the customer challenges right now that you see that can be easily turned into opportunities. >> Yeah. You know, the culture of automation is so different between, between the different between the different parts of the community, right? Developers expect something completely different than dev ops and network administrators, systems administrators. They just have different expectations on how automation should work. I've been writing software for a long time and the, the, the tension and conflicts between the teams can be extreme sometimes, right? We want to build and design automation capability that works in the domains that each of those people work in so that they can meet in the middle with a common set of tools. Dave mentioned identity, and event based automation, we all know that there are common things that are needed, but we also know that there are different ways to kind of achieve that depending on the space that you're in. And so a lot of, a lot of that has to do with these teams, being able to meet in the middle, collaborate on the automation, use content in the way that they expect, and then still provide that governance and reassurance that it's going to work and do the things that they want to do. Everything that we're doing here is about enabling that and supporting them. >> That's a great point. And I'd say that now more than ever this cultural, I won't say collision, there's always been tension as long as I can remember going back to my career in the eighties. When I started coding back in the day and the systems revolution, it was always tension between these groups because they had their own different worlds and they, (indistinct). But now with automation, there's almost like a peace treaty evolving where the speed game and cloud development becomes the unifying factor, right? If you can enable systems that can go faster because what this, what pisses people off, when someone's slower than they are. Where's that update, or, you know, but now we had harmony, this is cult. This is (indistinct), not touchy feely, Matthew. This is kind of what's going on right now. And David I'd love your reaction because this is like state-of-the-art issue. >> This is this a state-of-the-art particularly when we push the envelope on event driven automation, which leads right into AI ops and edge management and bleach fleet management. Being able to do this automation at scale at tremendous scale, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of endpoints. But let's also, we also have to keep in mind is behind all this is, how do you control the environment? How do you really lock down the security? How do you lock down the full supply chain in this automation, from the content creation to the execution, to what's being authorized to the policies? So these are all the pieces that we're investing in to start pulling together so that we can really push the envelope where automation is taking businesses and their ability to react to change and opportunities and challenges, but also in a controlled manner. >> Yeah. Give me infrastructure code, give me network security and transit and all that good stuff that goes on the network layer. And that mean push code when I want and automate the stuff that pisses people off. And we all get along, right? Matthew is, that's the, that's the future. >> That's right. None of it's optional anymore. Right? There's a lot of people out there. We see that with vulnerabilities and, and security issues that have cropped up over the, over the last year. It's, it's got to be one of the most important things that every organization is thinking about. >> Yeah, I think this site, this whole unification benefit is, is one of the most beautiful things that comes out of the technical benefits of the speed and the, and the advantages of, of the time to value with, with the enablement there. So I think that this is a really cutting edge issue. And thanks for bringing that up and, and discussing, and we're going to continue to talk more about it because we're seeing it very positive outcomes come from this with when you have all of these operational things automating away and then enabling more faster development for modernization. So thanks for, thanks for sharing that. So I just want to close out Matthew with you on saying, congratulations. I know you've been involved a lot of history with Ansible, but I got to ask you, what are you looking forward to most with this release? >> Oh, that's, that's such a good question because the engineering team working, working on some of the core features that we're bringing this time around, we have something that we'd been working on for years now, and it's all coming together with this release. We're really excited about it. Then we've talked a little bit before about collections and execution environments. You know, that goes back to AnsibleFest last year was like, what are we, what are we bringing this year? What, what are we giving you a window into, into our minds? And, you know, we talked about developer tools, but one of the things we've we've spent the most time on is how can we give you that window into your automation, worldwide planet, planet scale, data centers, clouds. It doesn't matter. You, you should be able to run automation anywhere that you need automation to run the Ansible automation platforms, automation mesh lands in this release. And it's the thing I'm most excited about because it gets that automation out to where you need it to run. If you're defining and governing your automation on the east coast of the U S and deploying it on the west coast in Asia, in Europe. Now you can do that and feel really good that it's going to work. It's survivable, it's reliable and it's fast. And the automation mesh brings, brings that to the production side, Ansible automation. And it works with the collections and the execution environments and the developer tools that we built around that to make sort of one scene one system for worldwide automation. And we'll spend the next year building on top of these technologies that we've mentioned that Dave's mentioned event based automation, compliance governance. Now we have the foundation we can build on to really, really sort of take it into the future next. >> You feel there's a lot of headroom there for innovation. >> Tons of headroom. >> Right? >> It's something we're really excited about. >> It's kind of like, it's like, when's the air conditioning going to come out? And they got all these new features coming out. You got to have great stuff there. Congratulations, Dave, we'll end it with you. I want to get your thoughts as AnsibleFest continues to have success with the community. The larger cross domain point that you brought up was key will be a coop con open sources continue to be a tailwind for developers and AI ops. Now you've got the edge exploding with value, new architectures, distributed computing, you know, Red Hats in the middle of it at many levels. What's your take on this revolution in software engineering, as opensource continues to drive as, and, and this new agile and automation kicks in, what's the impact? How do you see that this impacting the, the software, careers and outcomes of producing software? >> Well, the impact of open communities, ecosystems is incredible. It has been for years, and it just continues to accelerate. What I look forward to John with Fest and through this year, and next year is how is how we help bring together the wealth and capabilities of automation to enterprises to scale it to the enterprise across all the areas that they're driving towards. And you rattled off quite a few of them, including edge and security and how we bring the open communities, the open ecosystems, the content creation together with to deliver this value with customers. The growth has been incredible in this space. I don't see it slowing down. I just see it accelerating as the demands on businesses to really accelerate their delivery of new capabilities into market in new regions, with edge in a secure, in a secure manner. So being able to pull the open communities together and scaling this across enterprises, that that's the impact we're having. And it's great. >> It's really like, it's really almost a pinch me moment where you go, Hey, you know, a lot of the stuff we used to worry about is actually being solved. People are getting along scale is the new competitive advantage, modern applications, driving business value. This is kind of like nirvana coming around the corner it's happening. I mean, this is like what we, we, we would, we talked about decades ago, like technology will evolve to a point where it's faster and contributing more to humans. >> Yes, exactly, exactly. >> Great stuff. Okay, Matthew, thank you so much for coming on, Dave. Thank you for sharing. Congratulations. Great event. Stay, stay right there for more continued coverage of AnsibleFest, 2021. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.

(bright music) >> Well, hi everybody. John Walls here on theCUBE, continuing our coverage of AnsibleFest 2021 with Tom Anderson, the Vice President of Product Management at Red Hat. And Tom, you've been the answer, man, for theCUBE here over the last a week, 10 days or so. Third cube appearance, I hope we haven't worn you out. >> No, you haven't John, I love it, I love doing it. So that's great to have you have you at the event. >> Thank you for letting us be a part of that. It's been a lot of fun. Let's let's go and look at the event now. As far as big picture here, major takeaways that you think that have been talked about, that you think you'd like people, customers to go home with. If you will, though, a lot of this has been virtual obviously, but when I say go home, I made that figuratively, but what, what do you want people to remember and then apply to their businesses? >> Right. So being a product guy, I want to talk about products usually, right? So the big kind of product announcements from this year's event have been the rollout, and really, the next generation of the Ansible automation platform, which is really a rearchitecture turning it into a cloud native application an automation application itself that scales to our customer needs. So a lot of big announcements around that. And so what does that do for customers? That's really bringing them the automation platform that they can scale from the data center, to the cloud, to the Edge and everywhere in between, across a single platform with a single easy to use automation language. And then secondly, on that, as automation starts to shift left, we always talk about technology shifting left towards the developer, as automation is also shifting left towards the developer and other personas in an organization we're really happy about the developer tools and the tooling that we're providing to the customers with the new automation platform too, that brings development of content automation content. So the creation, the testing, the deployment and the management of that content across an enterprise far easier than it's ever been. So it's really kind of, it's a little bit about the democratization of automation. We see that shifting left, if you will. And I know I've said that already, but we see that shifting left of automation into other parts of the organization, beyond the domain experts, the network engineers or the storage experts, et cetera, pushing that automation out into the hands of other personas in the organization has been a big trend that we've seen and a lot of product announcements around that. So really excited about the product announcements in particular, but also the involvement and the engagement of our ecosystem, our upstream community. So important to our product and our success, our ecosystem partners, and obviously last but not least our customers and our users. >> So you hit a lot of big topics there. So let's talk about the Edge. You know, that seems to be a, you know, a fairly significant trend at this point, right? 'Cause trying to get the automation out there where the data besides, and that's where the apps are. Right? So where the data is, that's where things are happening out there on the Edge. So maybe just dive into that a little bit and about how you're trying to facilitate that need. >> Yeah. So a couple of trends around the Edge, obviously it's the architecture itself with lower capacity or lower capability devices and compute infrastructure at the Edge. And whether that's at the far edge with very low capacity devices, or even at near edge scenarios where you don't have, you know, data center, IT people out there to support those environments. So being able to get at those low capability, low capacity environments remotely Ansible is a really good fit for that because of our agentless architecture, the agentless architecture of Ansible itself allows you to drive automation out into the devices and into the environments where there isn't a high capacity infrastructure. And the other thing that the other theme that we've seen is one of the commonalities that no matter where the compute is taking place and the users are, there always has to be network. So we see a lot of network automation use cases out at the Edge and Ansible is, you know, the defacto network automation solution in the market. So we see a lot of our customers driving Ansible use cases out into their Edge devices. >> You know, you talk about development too, and just kind of this changing relationship between Ansible and DevOps and how that has certainly been maturing and seems to be really taking off right now. >> Yeah. So for, you know, what we've seen a lot of, as you know, is becoming frictionless, right? How do we take the friction out of the system that frees developers up to be more productive for organizations to be more agile, to roll out applications faster? How do we do that? We need to get access to the infrastructure and the resources that developers need. We need to get that access into their hands when they need it. And in our frictionless sort of way, right? So, you know, all of the old school, traditional ways of developers having to get infrastructure by opening a help desk ticket to get servers built for them and waiting for IT ops to build the servers and to deploy them and to send them back a message, all that is gone now. These, you know, subsystem owners, whether that's compute or cloud or network or storage, their ability to use Ansible to expose their resources for consumption by other personas, developers in this case, makes developers happy and more efficient because they can just use those automation playbooks, those Ansible playbooks to deploy the infrastructure that they need to develop, test and deploy their applications on. And the actual subsystem owners themselves can be assured that the usage of those environments is compliant with their standards because they've built and shared the automation with those developers to be able to consume when they want. So we're making both sides happy, agile, efficient developers and happy infrastructure owners, because they know that the governance and compliance around that system usage is on point with what they need and what they want. >> Yeah. It's a big win-win and a very good point. I always like it when we kind of get down to the nitty-gritty and talk about what a customer is really doing. Yeah. And because if we could talk about hypotheticals and trends and developing and maturity rates and all those kinds of things, but in terms of actual customers, you know, what people really are doing, what do you think have been a few of the plums that you'd like to make sure people were paying attention to? >> Yeah. I think from this year's event, I was really taken by the JP Morgan Chase presentation. And it really kind of fits into my idea of shifting left in the democratization of automation. They talked about, I think the number was around 7,000 people, associates inside that organization that are across 22 countries. So kind of global consumption of this. Building automation playbooks and sharing those across the organization. I mean, so gone are the days of, you know, very small teams of people doing, just automating the things that they do and it's grown so big. And, so pervasive now, I think JP Morgan Chase really kind of brings that out, tease that out, that kind of cultural impacts that's had on their organization, the efficiencies that have been able to draw off from that their ability to bring the developers and their operations teams together to be working as one. I think their story is really fantastic. And I think this is the second year. I think this is the second year that JP Morgan Chase has been presenting at Fest and this years session was fantastic. I really, really enjoyed that. So I would encourage, I would encourage anybody to go back and look at the recording of that session and there's game six groups, total other end of the spectrum, right? Financial services, JP Morgan Chase, global company to Gamesis, right? These people who are rolling out new games and need to be able to manage capacity really well. When a new game hits, right? Think about a new game hits and the type of demand and consumption there is for that game. And then the underlying infrastructure to support it. And Gamesis did a really great presentation around being able to scale out automation to scale up and down automation, to be able to spin up clusters and deploy infrastructure, to run their games on an as-needed basis. So kind of that business agility and how automation is driving that, or business agility is driving the need for automation in these organizations. So that that's just a couple of examples, but there was a good ones from another financial services that talked about the cultural impacts of automation, their idea of extreme automation. In fact, one of the sessions I interviewed Joe Mills, a gentlemen from this card services, financial services company, and he talked about extreme automation there and how they're using automation guilds in communities of practice in their organization to get over the cultural hurdles of adopting automation and sharing automation across an organization. >> Hm. So a wide array obviously of customer uses and all very effective, I guess, and, you know, and telling their own story. Somewhat related to that, and you, as you put it out there too, if you want to go back and look, these are really great case studies to take a look at. For those who, again, who maybe couldn't attend, or haven't had a chance to look at any of the sessions yet, what are some of the kinds of things that were discussed in terms of sessions to give somebody a flavor of what was discussed and maybe to tease them a little bit for next year, right? And just in case that you weren't able to participate and can't right now, there's always next year. So maybe if you could give us a little bit of flavor of that, too. >> Yeah. So we kind of break down the sessions a little bit into the more kind of technical sessions and then the sort of less technical sessions, let's put it that way. And on the technical session front, certainly a couple of sessions were really about getting started. Those are always popular with people new to Ansible. So there's the session that aired on the 29th, which has been recorded and you can rewatch it. That's getting started Q and A with the technical Ansible experts. That's a really, really great session 'cause you see that the types of questions that are being asked. So you know, you're not alone. If you're new to Ansible, the types of questions are probably the questions that you have as well. And then the, obviously the value of the tech Ansible experts who are answering this question. So that was a great session. And then for a lot of folks who may want to get involved in the community, the upstream community, there's a great session that was also on the 29th. And it was recorded for rewatching, around getting started with participation in the Ansible community and a live Q and A there. So the Ansible community, for those who don't know is a large, robust, vibrant, upstream community of users, of software companies, of all manners of people that are contributing and contributing upstream to the code and making Ansible a better solution for them and for everybody. So that's a great session. And then last but not least, almost always the most popular session is the roadmap sessions and Massimo Ferrari, gentleman on my team did a great session on the Ansible roadmap. So I do a search on roadmap in the session catalog, and you can see the recording of that. So that's always a big deal. >> Yeah, roadmaps were great, right? Because especially for newcomers, they want to know how I'm down here at 0.0. And, I've got a destination in mind, I want to go way out there. So how do I get there? So, to that point for somebody who is beginning their journey, and maybe they have, you know, they're automated with the ability to manually intervene, right? And now you've got to take the hands off the wheel and you're going to allow for full automation. So how, what's the message you want to get across to those people who maybe are going to lose that security blanket they've been hanging on to, you know, for a long time and you take the wheels off and go. >> No John, that's a great question. And that's usually a big apprehension of kind of full automation, which is, you know, that kind of turning over the reins, if you will, right to somebody else. If I'm the person who's responsible for this storage system, if I'm the person responsible for this network elements, these routers, these firewalls, whatever it might be, I'm really kind of freaked out about giving controls or access to those things, from a configuration standpoint, to people outside of my organization, who don't have the same level of expertise that I do, but here's the deal that in a well implemented well architected Ansible automation platform environment, you can control the type of automation that people do. Who does that against what managing that automation as code. So checking in, checking out, version control, deployment access. So there's a lot of controls that can be put in place. So it isn't just a free-for-all automated. Everybody automating everything. Organizations can roll out automation and have access to different kinds of automation, can control and manage what their organizations can use and see and do with Ansible. So there's lots of controls built-in for organizations to put in place and to make those subsystem owners give them confidence that how people are accessing their subsystems using Ansible automation can be controlled in a way that makes them comfortable and assures compliance and governance around those resources. >> Well, Tom, we appreciate the time. Once again, I know you've been a regular here on theCUBE over the course of the event. We'll give you a little bit of time off and let you get back to your day job, but we do appreciate that and I wish you success down the road. >> Thank you very much. And we'll see you again next year. >> You bet. Thank you, Tom Anderson, joining us Vice President of Product Management at Red Hat, talking about AnsibleFest, 2021. I'm John Walls, and you're watching theCUBE. (lively instrumental music)

(smooth upbeat music) >> Hello, everybody, John Walls here. Welcome to "theCUBE," in our continuing coverage of Ansible Fest 2021. We now welcome onto "theCUBE," three representatives from Red Hat. Joining us is Ashesh Badani. Who's the Senior Vice President of Products at Red Hat. Ashesh, thank you for joining us today. >> Thanks for having me, John. >> You bet. Also with us Stefanie Chiras, who is the Senior Vice President of the Platforms Business Group also at Red Hat. And Stefanie, how are you doing? >> Good, thanks, it's great to be here with you, John. >> Excellent, thanks for joining us. And last, but certainly not least, Joe Fitzgerald, who is the Vice President and General Manager of the Ansible Business Unit at Red Hat. Joe, good to see you today, thanks for being with us. >> Good to see you again John, thanks for having us. >> It's like, like the big three at Red Hat. I'm looking forward to this. Stefanie, let's just jump in with you and let's talk about what's going on in terms of automation in the hybrid cloud environment these days. A lot of people making that push, making their way in that direction. Everybody trying to drive more value out of the hybrid cloud environment. How is automation making that happen? How's it making it work? >> We have been focused at Red Hat for a number of years now on the value of open hybrid cloud. We really believe in the value of being able to give your applications flexibility, to use the best technology, where you want it, how you need it, and pulling all of that together. But core to that value proposition is making sure that it is consistent, it is secure and it is able to scale. And that's really where automation has become a core space. So as we continue to work our portfolio and our ecosystems and our partnerships to make sure that that open hybrid cloud has accessibility to everything that's new and relevant in this changing market we're in, the automation space that Ansible drives is really about making sure that it can be done in a way that is predictable. And that is really essential as you start to move your workloads around and start to leverage the diversity that an open hybrid cloud can deliver. >> When you're bringing this to a client, and Joe, perhaps you can weigh in on this as well. I would assume that as you're talking about automation, there's probably a lot of, successful head-nodding this way, but also some kind of this way too. There's a little bit of fear, right? And maybe just, they have these legacy systems, there's maybe a little distrust, I don't want to give away control, all these things. So how do you all answer those kinds of concerns when you're talking to the client about this great value that you can drive, but you got to get them there, right? You have to bring them along a bit. >> It's a great question, John, and look, everybody wants to get the hybrid cloud, as Stefanie mentioned. That journey is a little complicated. And if you had silos and challenges before you went to a hybrid cloud, you're going to have more when you got there. We work with a lot of customers, and what we see is this sort of shift from, I would call it low-level task automation to much more of a strategic focus on automation, but there's also the psychology of automation. One of the analysts recently did some research on that. And imagine just getting in your car and letting the car drive you down the street to work. People are still not quite comfortable with that level of automation, they sort of want to be able to trust, but verify, and maybe have their hands near the wheel. You couldn't take the wheel away from them. We see the same thing with automation. They need automation and a lot automation, or they need to be able to verify what it is doing, what they do, what it's going to do. And once they build that confidence, then they tend to do it at scale. And we're working with a lot of customers in that area. >> Joe, you're talking about a self-driving car, that'll never work, right? (laughs) You us bring an interesting point though. Again, I get that kind of surrendering control a little bit and Ashesh, I would assume in the product development world, that's very much your focus, right? You're looking for products that people, not only can use, but they're also comfortable with. That they can accept and they can integrate, and there's buy-in, not only on the engineering level, but also on the executive level. So maybe walk us through that product development, staging or phases, however you want to put it, that you go through in terms of developing products that you think people, not only need, but they'll also accept. >> I think that's absolutely right. You know, I think both Stefanie and Joe, led us off here. I talked about hybrid cloud and Joe, started talking about moving automation forward and getting people comfortable. I think a lot of this is, meeting customers where they are and then helping them get on the journey, right? So we're seeing that today, right? So traditional configuration management on premise, but at the same time, starting to think about, how do we take them out into the cloud, bringing greater automation to bear there. But so that's true for us across our existing customer base, as well as the new customers that we see out there. So doing that in a way that Joe talked about, right? Ensuring the trust, but verify is in play, is critical. And then there's another area which I'm sure we'll talk a little bit more about, right? Is ensuring that security implications are taken into account as we go through it. >> Well, let's just jump into security, that's one of the many considerations these days. About ensuring that you have the secure operation, you're doing some very complex tasks here, right? And you're blending multi-vendor environments and multi-domain environments. I mean you've got a lot, you're juggling a lot. So I guess to that extent, how much of a consideration is security and those multiple factors today, for you. And again, I don't know which one of the three of you might want to jump on this, but I would assume, this is a high priority, if not the highest priority, because of the headlines that security and those challenges are garnering these days. >> Well, there's the general security question and answer, right? So this is the whole, shift-left DevSecOps, sort of security concerns, but I think specific to this audience, perhaps I can turn over to Joe to talk a little bit about how Ansible has been playing in the security domain. >> Now, it's a great way to start, Ashesh. People are trying to shift left, which means move, sort of security earlier on in the process where people are thinking about it and development process, right? So we've worked with a lot of customers who were trying to do DevSecOps, right? And to provide security, automation capabilities during application build and deployment. Then on the operational side, you have this ongoing issue of some vulnerability gets identified, how fast can I secure my environment, right? There's a whole new area of security, orchestration, automation, or remediation that's involved, and the challenge people have is just like with networking or other areas, they've got dozens in some cases, hundreds of different systems across their enterprise that they have to integrate with, in order to be able to close a vulnerability, whether it's deploying a patch or closing a port, or changing firewall configuration, this is really complicated and they're being measured by, okay, there's this vulnerability, how fast can we get secure? And that comes down to automation, it has to. >> Now, Joe, you mentioned customers, if you would maybe elaborate a little bit about the customers that we've been hearing from on the stage, the virtual stage, if you will, at Ansible Fest this year and maybe summarize for our audience, what you're hearing from those customers, and some of those stories when we're talking about the actual use of the platform. >> Yeah, so Ansible Fest is our annual, automation event, right? For Ansible users. And I think it's really important to hear from the customers. We're vendors, we can tell you anything you want and try and get you to believe it. Customers they're actually doing stuff, right? And so, at Ansible Fest, we've got a great mix of customers that are really pushing the envelope. I'll give you one example, JP Morgan Chase. They're talking about how in their environment with focus over the past couple of years, they've now gotten to a level of maturity with automation, where they have over 50,000 people that are using Ansible automation. They've got a community of practice where they've got people in over twenty-two countries, right? That are sharing over 10,000 playbooks, right? I mean, they've taken automation strategically and embraced it and scaled it out at a level that most other organizations are envious of, right? Another one, and I'm not going to go through the list, but another one I'll mention is Discover, which sort of stepped back and looked at automation strategically and said, we need to elevate this to a strategic area for the company. And they started looking at across all different areas, not just IT automation, business process automation, on their other practices internally. And they're doing a presentation on how to basically analyze where you are today and how to take your automation initiatives forward in a strategic way. Those are usually important to other organizations that maybe aren't as far along or aren't on a scale of that motivation. >> Yeah, so Stefanie, I see you nodding your head and you're talking about, when Joe was just talking about assessment, right? You have to kind of see where are we, how mature are we on our journey right now? So maybe if you could elaborate on that a little bit, and some of the key considerations that you're seeing from businesses, from clients and potential clients, in terms of the kind of thought process they're going through on their journey, on their evolution. >> I think there's a lot of sort of values that customers are looking for when they're on their automation journey. I think efficiency is clearly one. I think one that ties back to the security discussion that we talked about. And I use the term consistency, but it's really about predictability. And I think I have a lot of conversations with customers that if they know that it's consistently deployed, particularly as we move out and are working with customers at the edge, how do they know that it's done the same way every time and that it's predictable? There's a ton of security and confidence built into that. And I think coming back to Joe's point, it is a journey providing transparency and visibility is step one, then taking action on that is then step two. And I think as we look at the customers who are on this automation journey, it's them understanding what's the value they're looking for? Are they looking for consistency in the deployments? Are they looking for efficiency across their deployments? Are they looking for ways to quickly migrate between areas in the open hybrid cloud? What is the value they're looking for? And then they look at how do they start to build in confidence in how they deliver that. And I think it starts with transparency. The next step is starting to move into taking action, and this is a space where Joe and the whole team, along with the community have really focused on pulling together things like collections, right? Playbooks that folks can count on and deploy. We've looked within the portfolio, we're leveraging the capabilities of this type of automation into our products itself with Red Hat enterprise Linux, we've introduced systems roles. And we're seeing a lot of by pulling in that Ansible capability directly into the product, it provides consistency of how it gets deployed and that delivers a ton of confidence to customers. >> So, Ashesh I mean, Stefanie was talking about, the customers and obviously developing, I guess, cultural acceptance and political acceptance, within the ranks there. Where are we headed here, past what know now in terms of the traditional applications and traditional automations and whatever. Kind of where is this going, if you would give me your crystal ball a bit about automation and what's going to happen here in the next 12-18 months. >> So what I'm going to do, John, is try to marry two ideas. So we talked about hybrid cloud, right? Stefanie started talking about joining a hybrid cloud. I'm going to marry automation with containers, right? On this journey of hybrid cloud, right? And give you two examples, both some successful progress we've been making on that front, right? Number one, especially for the group here, right? Check out the Ansible collection for Kubernetes, it's been updated for Python Three, of course, with the end-of-life for Python Two, but more important, right? It's the focus on improving performance for large automation tasks, right? Huge area where Ansible shines, then taking advantage of turbo mode, where instead of the default being a single connection to a Culebra API, for every request that's out there with turbo mode turned on, the API connection gets reused significantly and obviously improving performance. Huge other set of enhancements as well, right? So I think that's an interesting area for the Ansible community to leverage and obviously to grow. And the second one that I wanted to call out was just kind of the, again, back to this sort of your notion of the marriage of automation with containers, right? Is the work that's going on, on the front of the integration, the tight integration between Ansible as well as Red Hat's, advanced cluster management, right? Which is helping to manage Kubernetes clusters at scale. So now Red Hat's ACM technology can help our monthly trigger Ansible playbooks, upon key lifecycle actions that have happened. And so taking advantage of technologies like operators, again, core Kubernetes construct for the hybrid cloud environment. This integration between advanced cluster management and Ansible, allows for much more efficient execution of tasks, right? So I think that's really powerful. So wrapping that up, right? This world of hybrid cloud really can be brought together by just a tighter integration between working Ansible as well as the work that's going on on the container plant. >> Great, well, thank you. Ashesh, Stefanie, Joe, thank you all for sharing the time here. Part of our Ansible Fest coverage here, enjoy the conversation and continuous success at Red Hat. Thank you for the time today. >> Thank you so much John. >> Thank you. >> You bet. I'm joined here by three executives at Red Hat, talking about our Ansible Fest 2021 coverage. I'm John Walls, and you're watching "theCUBE." (bright music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AnsibleFest 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. >> The ascendancy of massive clouds underscored the limits of human labor. People, they simply don't scale at the pace of today's technology. And this trend created an automation mandate for IT which has been further accentuated by the pandemic. The world is witnessing the build-out of a massively distributed system that comprises on-prem apps, public clouds and edge computing. The challenge we face is how to go from managing things you can see and touch to cost effectively managing, securing and scaling these vast systems. It requires an automation first mindset. Hello, everyone. This is Dave Vellante and welcome back to AnsibleFest 2020. We have a great panel to wrap up this show. With me are our three excellent guests and CUBE alums. Ashesh Badani is the Senior Vice President of Cloud Platforms at Red Hat. Ashesh, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, likewise. Thanks for having me on again, Dave. >> Stefanie Chiras is Vice President and General Manager of the RHEL Business Unit and my sports buddy. Stefanie, glad to see you back in the New England area. I knew you'd be back. >> Yeah, good to see you, Dave. Thanks for having us today. >> You're very welcome. And then finally, Joe Fitzgerald, longtime CUBE alum, Vice President and General Manager of the Management Business Unit at Red Hat. Joe, good to see you. >> Hey, Dave, good to be here with you. >> Ashesh, I'm going to start with you. Lay out the big picture for us. So how do you see this evolution to what we sometimes talk about as hybrid cloud, but really truly a hybrid cloud environment across these three platforms that I just talked about? >> Yeah, let me start off by echoing something that most of your viewers have probably heard in the past. There's always this notion about developers, developers, developers. And you know, that still holds true. We aren't going away from that anymore. Developers are the new kingmakers. But increasingly, as the scope and complexity of applications and services that are deployed in this heterogeneous environment increases, it's more and more about automation, automation, automation. In the times we live in today, even, you know, before dealing with the crises that, you know, we have, just the sheer magnitude of requirements that are being placed on enterprises and expectations from customers require us to be more and more focused on automating tasks which humans just can't keep up with. So you know, as we look forward, this conversation here today, you know, what Ansible's doing, you know, is squarely aimed at dealing with this complexity that we all face. >> So Stefanie, I wonder if you could talk about what it's going to take to implement what I call this true hybrid cloud, this connection and management of this environment. RHEL is obviously a key piece of that. That's going to be your business unit, but take us through your thoughts there. >> Yeah, so I'm kind of building on what Ashesh said. When we look at this hybrid cloud world, right, which now hybrid is much more than it was considered five years ago. It used to be hybrid was on-prem versus off-prem. Now, hybrid translates to many layers in the stack. It can be VMs hybrid with containers. It can be on-prem with off-prem and clearly with edge involved, as well. Whenever you start to require the ability to bridge across these, that's where we focus on having a platform that allows you to access sort of all of those and be able to deploy your applications in a simple way. When I look at what customers require, it's all about speed of deploying applications, right, build, deploy and run your applications. It's about stability, which is clearly where we're focused on RHEL being able to provide that stability across multiple types of hybrid deployment models. And third is all about scale. It is absolutely all about scale and that's across multiple ranges in hybrid, be it on-prem, off-prem, edge and that's where all of this automation comes in, so to me, it's really about where do you make those strategic decisions that allow you to choose, right, for the flexibility that you need and still be able to deploy applications with speed, have that stability, resiliency, and be able to scale. >> So Joe, let's talk about your swim lane and it's weird to even use that term, right? 'Cause as Stefanie just said, we're kind of breaking down all these silos that we talk in terms of platform, but how do you see this evolving, and specifically, what's the contribution from a management perspective? >> Right, so Stefanie and Ashesh talked about sort of speed, scale and complexity. Right, people are trying to deploy things faster or larger scale, and oh, by the way, keep everything highly available and secure. That's a challenge, right? And so, you know, interestingly enough, Red Hat, about five years ago, we recognized that automation was going to be a problem as people were moving into open hybrid clouds, which we've been working with our customers for years on. And so we acquired this small company called Ansible, which had some really early emerging technology, all open source, right, to do automation. And what we've done over the past five years is we've really amplified that automation and amplified the innovation in that community to be able to provide automation across a wide array of domains that you need to automate, right, and to be able to plug that in to all the different processes that people need in order to be able to go faster, but to track, manage, secure and govern these kind of environments. So we made this bet years ago and it's paying off for Red Hat in very big ways. >> I mean, no doubt about it. I mean, when you guys bought Ansible, so it wasn't clear that it was going to be the clear leader. It is now. I mean, it's pulled ahead of Chef, Puppet. You saw, you know, VMware bought Salt, but I mean, Ansible very clearly has, based on our surveys, the greatest market momentum. We're going to talk about that. I know some of the other analysts have chimed in on this, but let me come back to this notion of on-prem and cloud and edge and this is complicated. I mean, the edge, it's kind of its own island, isn't it? I mean, you got the IT and the OT schism, so maybe you could talk a little bit about how you see those worlds coming together, the cloud, the on-prem, the edge. Maybe Stefanie, you can start. >> Yeah, I think the magic, Dave, is going to happen when it's not its own island, right, as we start to see this world driven by data cause the spread of a data center to be really dis-aggregated and allow that compute to move out closer to the data, the magic happens when it doesn't feel like an island, right, that's the beauty and the promise of hybrid. So when you start to look at what can you provide that is consistent that serves as a single language that you can talk to from on-prem, off-prem and edge, you know, it all comes down to, for us, having a platform that you can build once and deploy across all of those, but the real delicacy with edge is there are some different deployment models. I think that comes into deployment space and we're clearly getting feedback from customers. We're working on some capabilities where edge requires some different deployment models in the ways you update, et cetera, and thanks to all of you out there who are working with us upstream in order to deliver that. And I think the second place where it's unique is in this ability to manage and automate out at the edge, but our goal is certainly at our platform levels, whether it be on RHEL, whether it be on OpenShift to provide that consistent platform that allows you that ease of deployment, then you got to manage and automate it and that's where the whole Ansible and the ecosystem really plays in. You need that ecosystem and that's always what I love about AnsibleFest is this community comes together and it's a vibrant community, for sure. >> Well, I mean, Ashesh, you guys are betting big on this and I often think of the cloud is just this one big cloud. You got the on-prem cloud, you got the public clouds. Edge becomes just an extension of that cloud. Is that how you think about it and what is it actually going to take to make that edge not an island? >> Yeah, great point, Dave, and that's exactly how we think about it. We've always thought about our vision of the cloud as being a platform and abstraction that spans all the underlying infrastructure that the user can take advantage of, so if it happens to reside in a data center, some in a private cloud running off a data center, more increasingly in the public cloud setting, and as Stefanie called out, we're also starting to see edge deployments come in. We're seeing, you know, big build-outs in the work we're doing with telecom providers from a 5G perspective that's helping drive that. We're seeing, if you will, IOT-like opportunities with, let's say, the automotive sector or some in the retail sector, as well. And so this fabric, if you will, needs to span this entire set of deployment that a customer will take advantage of. And Joe started touching on this a little bit, right, with this notion of the speed, scale and complexity, so we see this platform needing to expand to all these footprints that customers are using. At the same time, the requirements that they have, even when they're going out the edge, is the same with regard to what they see in the data center and the public cloud, so putting all that together really is our sweet spot. That's our focus. And to the point you're making, Dave, that's where we're making a huge bet across all of Red Hat. >> So I mentioned, you know, some of our research and I do these breaking analysis segments every week and recently I was digging into cloud and specifically was interested in hybrid and multi. And you know, hybrid been I think pretty well understood for awhile. Multi I think was a lot of, you know, a lot of talk, but it's becoming real and the data really shows that. It shows OpenShift and Ansible have momentum. I mentioned that before. Yeah, you know, obviously VMware is there, but clearly Red Hat is well positioned specifically in multicloud and hybrid. And I know some of the other analyst firms have picked up on this. What are you guys seeing in the market? Maybe Joe, you can chime in and Ashesh, you can maybe add some color. >> Yeah, so you know, there's a lot of fashion, right, around hybrid and multicloud today, so every vendor is jumping on with multicloud storing. And you know, a lot of the vendors' strategies are, pick my solution and vertically use my stuff in the public cloud on-premise, maybe even at the edge, right, and you'll be fine. And you know, obviously customers don't like lock-in. They like to be able to take advantage of the best services, availability, security, different things that are available in each of these different clouds, right? So there is a strong preference for hybrid and multicloud. Red Hat is sort of the Switzerland of hybrid and multicloud because we enable you to run your workloads across all these different substrates, whether it's in public clouds, multiple, right, into the data center and physical, virtual, bare metal, out to the edge and edge is not a single homogeneous, you know, set of hardware or even implementation. It varies a lot by vertical, so you have a lot of diversity, right? And so Red Hat is really good at helping provide the platforms like OpenShift and RHEL that are going to provide that consistency across those different environments or also in the case of Ansible to provide automation that's going to match the physics of management and automation that are required across each of those different environments. Trust me, managing or automating something at the edge and with very small footprint of some device across the constraint network is very, very different than managing things in a public cloud or in a data center and that's where I think Red Hat is really focused and that's our sweet spot, helping people manage those environments. >> And Ashesh, you guys have obviously put a lot of effort there. If you could maybe comment. >> Yeah, I was just going to say, Dave, I'll add just really quickly to what Joe said. He said it well. But the thing I will add is the way for us to succeed here is to follow the user, follow the customer. Right, instead of us just coming out with regard to what we believe the path to be, you know, we're really kind of working closely with the actual customers that we have. So for example, recently been working with a large water utility in Italy, but they're thinking about, you know, the world that they live in and how can they go off and, you know, have kiosks that are spread throughout Italy, able to provide reports with regard to the quality of the water that's available, as well as other services to all their citizens. But it's really interesting use case for us to go off and pursue because in some sense, you can ask yourself, well, is that public cloud? Are they going to take advantage of those services? Is that, you know, private cloud? Is that data center, is that IOT, is that edge? At a certain point in time, what you've got to think about is, well, we've got to provide integrated end-to-end solution that spans all of these different worlds, and so as long as I think we keep that focus, as long as we make sure our North Star is really what the user's trying to do, what problem they're trying to solve, I think we'll come out just fine on the other side of this. >> So I'd love to get all your thoughts, all three of you, on just what's going on in containers, generally, Kubernetes, specifically. I mean, everybody knows it's a hot space and the data shows that it is maturing, but it's amazing to me how much momentum it still has. I mean, it's like the new shiny toy, but it's everywhere and so it's able to sort of maintain that velocity and it's really becoming the go-to cloud native development platform, so the question is how is Red Hat, you know, helping your customers connect OpenShift to the rest of their IT infrastructure, platforms, their processes, the tools. I mean, who wants to start? I'd love to hear from all three of you. Ashesh, why don't you kick it off and then we'll just go left to right. >> So Dave, we've spoken to you and to folks the CUBE, as well, other for many years on this. We've made a huge investment in the Kubernetes market and been one of the earliest to do that and we continue to believe in the promise that it delivers to users, this notion of being able to have an environment that customers can use regardless of the underlying choices that they make. Here's an extremely powerful one, it's truly an open source, right? This is key to, you know, what we do. Increasingly, what we're working on is to ensure that one, if you make a commitment to Kubernetes and increasingly we see lots of customers around the world doing that, that we ensure that we're working closely, that our entire portfolio helps support that. So if you're going to make a choice with regard to Kubernetes base deployment, we help support you running it yourself wherever it is that you choose to run it, we help support you whether you choose to have us manage on your behalf and then also make sure we're providing an entire portfolio of services, both within Red Hat as well as from third parties so that you have the most productive, integrated experience possible. >> Okay, and Stefanie, loved your point of view on this, and Joe, I'd love to understand how you're bridging kind of the Ansible and Kubernetes communities, but Stefanie, why don't you chime in first? >> Yeah, I'll quickly add to what Ashesh said and talked about well on really the promise and the value of containers, but particularly from a RHEL perspective, we have taken all our capabilities and knowledge in the Linux space and we have taken that to apply it to OpenShift, right, because Kubernetes and containers is just another way to deploy Linux, so making sure that that underpinning is stable, secure and resilient and tied to an ecosystem, right? An ecosystem of various architectures, an ecosystem of ISVs and tooling, right? We've pulled that together and everything we've done in Linux for, you know, over decades now at Red Hat and we've put that into that customer experience around OpenShift to deploy containers, so we've really built, it has been a portfolio-wide effort, as Ashesh alluded to, and of course, it passes over to Ansible as well with Joe's portfolio. >> Yeah, we talked about this upfront, Joe. The communities are so crucial, so how are you bridging those Ansible and Kubernetes communities? What's your thought on that? >> Well, a quick note about those communities. So you know, OpenShift is built on Kubernetes and a number of other projects. Kubernetes is number seven in the top 10 open source projects based on the number of contributors. Turns out Ansible is number nine, right? So if you think about it, these are two incredibly robust communities, right? On the one hand, building the container platform in Kubernetes and in the other around Ansible and automation. It turns out that as the need for this digital acceleration and building these container-based applications comes along, there's a lot of other things that have to be done when you deploy container-based applications, whether it's infrastructure automation, right, to expand and manage and automate the infrastructure that you're running your container-based applications on, creating more clusters, you know, configuring storage, network, you know, counts, things like that, but also connecting to other systems in the environment that need to be integrated with around, you know, ITSM or systems of record, change management, inventory, cost, things like that, so what we've done is we've integrated Ansible, right, in a very powerful way with OpenShift through our advanced cluster management capability, which allows us to provide an easy way to instrument Ansible during critical points, whether it's you're deploying new clusters out there or you're deploying a new version of an application or a new application for the first time, whether you're checking policy, right, to ensure that, you know, the thing is secure and that, you know, you can govern these environments, right, that you're relying on. So we've really now tied together two sort of de facto standards, OpenShift built on Kubernetes and a number of other projects and then Ansible, or Red Hat, has taken this innovation in the community and created these certified content collections, platforms and capabilities that people can actually build and rely on and know that it's going to work. >> Ashesh, I mean, Red Hat has earned the right, really, to play in both the cloud native world and of course the traditional infrastructure world, but I'm interested in what you're seeing there, how you're bringing those two worlds together. Are they still, you know, largely separate? Are you seeing traditional IT? I mean, you're certainly seeing them lean in to more and more cloud native, but what are you guys doing specifically to kind of bring those worlds together? >> Yeah, increasingly it's really hard to be able to separate out those worlds, right? So in the past, we used to call it shadow IT. There really is no shadow IT anymore, right? This is IT. So we've embraced that completely. You know, our take on that is to say there are certain applications that are going to be appropriate for being run in a data center a certain way. There are certain other workloads that'll find their way appropriate for the public cloud. We want to make sure we're meeting them across, but what we want to do is constantly introduce technologies to help support the choices customers make. What do I mean by that? Let me give a couple examples. One is, you know, we can say customers have VMs that are based out in specific environments and they can only run as VMs. That code can't be containerized for a variety of reasons, right? You know, hard to re-architect that, don't have the funds, you know, have certain security compliance reasons. Well, what if we could take those VMs and then have them be run in containers in a native fashion? Wouldn't that be extremely powerful value proposition to run containers and then VMs as containers sort of side by side with Kubernetes orchestrating them all. So that's a capability we call open source virtualization. We've introduced that and made that generally available within our platform. Another one, which I think Joe starting to touch on a little bit here, is both around this notion of Ansible, as well as advanced cluster management. And say, once technologies like Ansible are familiar to our customers, how about if we find ways to introduce things like the operator framework to help support people's use of Ansible and introduce technologies like advanced cluster management, which allows for us to say, well, regardless of where you run your clusters, whether you run your Kubernetes clusters on premise, you run them in the cloud, right, we can imagine a consistent fashion and manage, you know, health and policy and compliance of applications across that entire state. So David, question's extremely good one, right, but what we are trying to do is try to be able to say, you know, we are going to just span those two worlds and provide as many tools as possible to ensure that customers feel like, you know, the shift, if you will, or the move between traditional enterprise software application development and the more modern cloud native can be bridged as seamlessly as possible. >> Yeah, Joe, we heard a lot of this at AnsibleFest, so the ACM as a key component of your innovation, and frankly, your competitive posture. Anything you would add to what Ashesh just shared? >> Well, I think that one of the things that Red Hat is really good at is we take management and automation as sort of an intrinsic part of what needs to go on. It's not an afterthought. You just don't go build something, go, "Oh I need management," go out and, you know, go get something, right, so we've been working on, sort of automation and management for many, many years, right, so we build it in concert with these platforms, right, and we understand the physics of these different environments, so we're very focused on that from inception, as opposed to an afterthought when people sort of paint themselves into a corner or have management challenges they can't deal with. >> There's a lot of analogs in our business, isn't there? Management is a bolt-on and security is a bolt-on. It just doesn't work that well and certainly doesn't scale. Stefanie, I want to come back to you and I want to come back to the edge. We hear a lot of people talking about extending their deployments to the edge in the future. I mean, you look at what IBM's doing. They're essentially betting its business on RHEL and OpenShift and betting that its customers are going to do the same as well are you. Maybe talk about, you know, what you're doing to specifically extend RHEL to the edge. >> Yeah, Dave, so we've been looking at this space consistent with our strategy, as Ashesh talked about, right? Our goal is to make sure that it all looks and feels the same and provides one single Linux experience. We've been building on a number of those aspects for quite some time, things like being able to deal with heterogeneous architectures, as an example, being able to deal with, you know, having Arm components and x86 components and power components and being able to leverage all of that from multiple vendors and being able to deploy. Those are things we've been focused on for a long time and now when you move into the space of the edge, certainly we're seeing, you know, essentially data center level hardware move out to be dis-aggregated and dispersed as they move it closer to the data and where that's coming in and where the analysis needs to be done, but some of those foundational things that we've been working on for years starts to pay off because the edge tends to be more heterogeneous all the way from an architecture level to an application level, so now we're seeing some asks. We've been working upstream in order to pull in some features that drive capabilities around specifically updating, deploying those updates, doing rollbacks and things like that, so we're focused on that. But really, it's about pulling together the capabilities of having multiple architectures, dealing with heterogeneous infrastructure out there at the edge, being able to reliably deploy it even when, for example, we have customers who they deploy their hardware and they can't touch it for years. How do they make sure that that's out there in a stable environment that they can count on? And then, you know, adding in things like containerization. We talked about the magic of that, being able to deploy an application consistently and being able to deploy a single container out there to the edge. We're thinking about it all the way from the architecture up to how the application gets deployed and it's going to take the whole portfolio to do that as you need to manage it, as you need to deploy containers, so it's a focus across the company for how we deal with that. >> And as we were talking about before, you know, it takes a village. You know that bromide, but it does, requires an ecosystem of jobs. I mean, there's some real technical challenges in R&D that has to happen. I mean, you've got to be, you know, you're talking about cloud native in all three different clouds, and you know, and not just the big three, but other clouds and then bringing that to the edge, so there's some clear technical challenges, but there's also some business challenges out there. So you know, what are you seeing in that regard? You know, what are some of those things that you hope to solve by bridging that gap? >> Well, I think one of the things we're trying to do and I'm focused on the management and automation side is to provide a common set of management tooling of automation, right, and I think Ansible fits that quite well. So for the past five years since Ansible's been part of Red Hat, we've expanded from, you know, they started off initially doing configuration management, right? We've expanded to include, you know, network and storage and security, now edge. At AnsibleFest, we demonstrated things like serverless event-driven automation, right, building an OpenShift serverless in Knative. We're trying to expand the use cases for Ansible so that there's a simplicity, there's a tool reduction, right, across all these environments and you don't have to go deal with nine vendors, and you know, 17 different tools to try to manage each element here to be able to provide a common set. It reduces complexity, cost and allows skills to be able to be reused across these different areas. It's going to all be about digital acceleration, right, and reducing that complexity. And one last comment. One of the reasons we bought Ansible years ago is the architecture, it's agent-less. Many of our competitors that you hear, the first thing they want to do is go deploy an agent somewhere and that creates its own ongoing burden of, do I have the latest version of the agent? Is it secure? Does it fit on the device? As Stefanie mentioned, is there a version that fits on the architecture the device is running on? It starts getting really, really complicated. So Ansible is just simple, elegant, agent-less. We've expanded the domains we can automate with it and we've expanded sort of the modality. How can I call it? User, driven by an event, as part of some life cycle management, app deployment, Ansible plugs right in. >> Well, Joe, you can tell you're a management guy, right? Agents, another thing that has to be managed. You just laundry list of stuff. (laughs) I want to come back to this notion Joe just touched on, this digital transformation. They say, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Well, COVID broke everything. And I got to say, I mean, all the talk about digital transformation over the last, you know, several years, yes, it was certainly happening, but there was also a lot of lip service going on and now if you're not digital, you're out of business. And so, you know, given everything that we've seen in the last, you know, whatever, 150, 200 days or so, what's the impact that you're seeing on customers' digital transformation initiatives, and you know, what is Red Hat doing to respond? Maybe Ashesh, you could start and we can get feedback from the others. >> Yeah, David, it's an unfortunate thing to say, right, but there's that meme going around with regard to who's responsible for digital transformation and it's a little bit of I guess gallows humor to call it COVID, but we're increasingly seeing that customers and the journey that they're on is one that they haven't really gotten off, even with this, if you will, change of environment that's come about. So projects that we've seen in play, you know, are still underway. We've seen acceleration, actually, in some places with regard to making services more easily accessible. Anyone who's invested in hybrid cloud or public cloud is seeing huge value with regard to being able to consume services remotely, being able to do this on demand and that's a big part of the value proposition, you know, that comes forward. And increasingly what we're trying to do is try to say, how can we engage and assist you in these times, right? So our services team, for example, has transformed to be able to help customers remotely. Our support team has gone off and work more and more with customers. For a company like Red Hat, that hasn't been completely, if you will, difficult thing to do mostly because we've been so used to working in a distributed fashion, working remotely with our customers, so that's not a challenge in itself, but making sure customers understand that this is really a critical journey for them to go on and how we can kind of help them, you know, walk through that has been good and we're finding that that message really resonates. Right, so both Stefanie and Joe talked a little bit about, you know, how essentially our entire portfolio is now built around, you know, ensuring that if you'd like to consume on demand, we can help support you, if you'd like to consume in a traditional fashion, we can help you. That amount of flexibility that we provide to customers is really coming to bear at this point in time. >> So maybe we could wrap with, we haven't really dropped any customer names. Stefanie and Joe and Ashesh, I wonder if you have any stories you can share or, you know, customer examples that we could close on that are exciting to you this year. >> So I can start, if that's okay. >> Please. >> So an area that I find super interesting from a customer perspective that we're increasingly seeing more and more customers go down is sheer interest in, if you will, kind of diversity of use cases that we're seeing, right? So we see this, for example, in automotive, right? So whether it's a BMW or a Volkswagen, we see this now in health care with the ACA, in we'll say a little bit more traditional industries like energy with Exxon or Schlumberger around increasingly embrace of AIML, right? So artificial machine learning, if you will, advanced analytics being much more proactive with regard to how they can take data that's coming in, adjust it, be able to make sense of the patterns and then be able to, you know, have some action that has real business impact. So this whole trend towards, you know, AIML workloads that they can run is extremely powerful. We work very closely with Nvidia, as well, and we're seeing a lot of interest, for example, in being able to run a Kubernetes-based platform, support Nvidia GPUs for specific class workloads. There's a whole bunch of customers, people in financial services that, you know, this is a rich area of interest. You know, we've seen great use cases for example around grid with Deutsche Bank. And so, to me, I'm personally really excited to see kind of that embrace the PC from our customers regard to saying there's a whole lot of data that's out there. You know, how can we essentially use all of these tools that we have in place? You know, we talk about containers, microservices, DevOps, you know, all of this and then put it to bear to really put to work and get business value. >> Great, thank you for that, Ashesh. Stefanie, Joe, Stefanie, anything you want to add or final thoughts? >> Yeah, just one thing to add and I think Ashesh talked to a whole number across industry verticals and customers. But I think the one thing that I've seen through COVID is that if nothing else, it's taught us that change is the only constant and I think, you know, our whole vision of open hybrid cloud is how to enable customers to be flexible and do what they need to do when they need to do it, wherever they want to deploy, however they want to build. We provide them some consistency, right, across that as they make those changes and I think as I've worked with customers here through since the beginning of COVID, it's been amazing to me the diversity of how they've had to respond. Some have doubled down in the data center, some have doubled down on going public cloud and to me, this is the proof of the strategy that we're on, right, that open hybrid cloud is about delivering flexibility, and boy, nothing's taught us the need for flexibility like COVID has recently, so I think there's a lot more to do. I think pulling together the platforms and the automation is what is going to enable the ability to do that in a simple fashion. >> So Joe, you get the final word. I mean, AnsibleFest 2020, I mean, it's weird, right? But that's the way these events are, all virtual. Hopefully, next year we got a shot at being face to face, but bring us home, please. >> Yeah, I got to tell ya, having, you know, 20,000 or so of your closest friends get together to talk about automation for a couple of days is just amazing. That just shows you sort of the power of it. You know, we have a lot of customers this week at AnsibleFest telling you their story, you know, CarMax and ExxonMobil, you know, BlueCross BlueShield. I mean, there's a number across all different verticals, globally, Cepsa from Europe. I mean, just an incredibly, you know, diverse array of customers and use cases. I would encourage people to look at some of the customer presentations that were on at AnsibleFest, listen to the customer telling you what they're doing with Ansible, deploying their networks, deploying their apps, managing their infrastructure, container apps, traditional apps, connecting it, moving faster. They have amazing stories. I encourage people to go look. >> Well, guys, thanks so much for helping us wrap up AnsibleFest 2020. It was really a great discussion. You guys have always been awesome CUBE guests. Really appreciate the partnership and so thank you. >> Thanks a lot, Dave. Appreciate it. >> Yeah, thanks, Dave. >> Thanks for having us. >> All right, and thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time. (calm music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCube. With digital coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. Brought to you by Red Hat. (twinkly music) >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCube. Welcome back to our continuous coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. We're not in-person this year, as everybody knows, but we're back covering the event. We're excited to be here, and really our next guest... We've had him on a lot of times. He's super insightful. Coming right off the keynote, diving into some really interesting topics that we're excited to get into, and it's Chris Wright. He's the chief technology officer of Red Hat. Chris, great to see you. >> Hey, great to see you. Thanks for having me on. >> Absolutely. So let's jump into it. I mean, you covered so many topics in your keynote. The first one though, that just jumps off the page, right, is automation, and really rethinking automation. And I remember talking to a product manager at a hyperscaler many moons ago, and he talked about the process of them mapping out their growth and trying to figure out how they were going to support it in their own data center. And he just basically figured out we cannot do this at scale without automation. So I think the hyperscalers have been doing it, but really it's kind of a new approach for enterprises to incorporate new, and more, automation into what they do every day. >> It's a fundamental part of scaling, and I think we've learned over time that, one, we need programming interfaces on everything. So that's a critical part of beginning of the automation journey, so now you have a programmatic way to interact with all the things out there. But the other piece is just creating, really, confidence in knowing that when you're automating and you're taking tasks away from humans, which are actually error-prone, and typing on a keyboard is not always the greatest way to get things done, the confidence that those automation scripts, or playbooks, are going to do the right things at the right time. And so creating, really, a business and a mindset around infusing automation into everything you do is a pretty big journey for the enterprise. >> Right. And that's one of the topics you talked about as well, and it comes up all the time with digital transformation or software development; this kind of shift the focus from kind of it's a destination to it's a journey. And you talked very specifically that you need to think about automation as a journey, and as a process, and even a language, and really bake it into as many processes as you possibly can. I'm sure that shocks a lot of people and probably scares them, but really that's the only way to achieve the types of scales that we're seeing out there. >> Well, I think so. And part of what I was trying to highlight is the notion that a business is filled with people with domain expertise. So everybody brings something to the table. You're a business analyst. You understand the business part of what you're providing. You're the technologist. You really understand the technology. There's a partner ecosystem coming in with a critical parts of the technology stack. When you want to bring this all together, you need to have a common way to communicate. What I was really trying to point out is a language for communication across all those different cross-functional parts of your business is critical, number one, and number two, that language can actually be an automation language. And so choosing that language wisely... Obviously, we're talking at AnsibleFest, so we're going to be talking a lot about Ansible in this context. Choosing that language wisely is part of how you build the end-to-end sort of internalized view of what automation means to your business. >> Right. I mean, I wrote down a bunch of quotes that you talked about. "Ansible is the language of automation, and automation should be a primary communication language." Again, very different kind of language that we don't hear. And that it's "more than a tool, but a process, a constant process, and should be an embedded component of any organization." So I mean, you're really talking about automation as a first class citizen, not kind of this last thing for the most advanced, or potentially last thing for the most simple things where we can apply this process, but really needs to be a fundamental core of the way you think about everything that you do. Really a very different way to think about things, and probably really appropriate as we come out of 2020 in this kind of new world where everyone liked distributed teams. Well, now you have distributed teams, and so the forcing function on better tooling that's really wrapped in better culture has never been greater than we're seeing today. >> I completely agree with that. That domain expertise I think we understand well in certain areas. So for example, application developers, they rely on one another. So you're, maybe as an application developer, consuming a service from somebody else in your microservices architecture, and so you're dependent on that other engineering team's domain expertise. Maybe that's even the database service, and you're not a database, a DBA, or an engineer that really builds schemas for databases. We kind of get that notion of encapsulating domain expertise in the building and delivering of applications. That notion, the CI/CD pipeline, which itself is automating how you build and deliver applications, that notion of encapsulating domain expertise across a series of different functions in your business can go much broader than just building and delivering the application. It's running your business. And that's where it becomes fundamental. It becomes a process that's the journey. Not the end state. And it's not the destination. It's the journey that matters. And I've seen some really interesting ways that people actually work on this and try to approach it from the "how do you change your mindset?" Here's one example that I thought was really unique. I was speaking with a customer who quite literally automated their existing process, and what they did was automate everything from generating the emails to the PDFs, which would then be shared as basically printed out documents for how they walked through business change when they're making a change in their product. And the reason they did that was not because that was the most efficient model at all. It was that was the way they could get the teams comfortable with automation. If it produced the same artifacts that they were already used to, then it created confidence, and then they could sort of evolve the model to streamline it, because printing out a piece of paper to review, it is not going to be the efficient way to make changes in your business. >> Well, just to follow up on that, right, cause I think what probably scares a lot of people about automation... One is exception handling, right? And can you get all the edge cases in the use case. So in the one you just talked about, how do they deal with that? And then I think the other one is just simply control. Do I feel confident enough that I can get the automation to a place that I'm comfortable to hand over control? And I'm just curious, in that case you just outlined, how do they deal with kind of those two factors? >> Well, they always enabled a human checkpoint. Especially in the beginning. So it was sort of "trust but verify" that model, and over time you can look at the things that you really understand well and start with those, and the things that have more kind of gray zones, where the exceptions may be the rule, or may be the critical part of the decision making process, those can be sort of flagged as "needs real kind of human intervention," and that's a way to sort of evolve, and iterate, and not start off with the notion that everything has to be automated. You can do it piecemeal and grow over time, and you'll build confidence, and you'll understand where... How to flag those exceptions, where you actually need to change your process itself, because you may have bottlenecks that don't really make sense for the business anymore, and where you can incorporate the exception handling into the automation, essentially. >> Right. That's great. Thank you for sharing that example. I want to shift gears a little bit, cause another big topic that you covered in your keynote that we talk about all the time on theCube is edge, right? So everybody knows what a data center is. Everybody knows what a public cloud is. Lots of conversations around hybrid cloud and multi cloud, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera... But this new thing is edge, and I think people talk about edge in kind of an esoteric way, but I think you just nailed it. I mean, you just nailed it. It's very simply moving the compute to where the data is collected and/or consumed. I thought that was super elegant, but what you didn't get into on all the complexity is what that means, right? I mean, data centers are pristine environments that... They're very, very controlled. The environment's controlled. The network is controlled. The security is controlled, and you have the vision of an edge device. And the one everyone always likes to use is say like a wind farm, right? Those things are out in crazy harsh conditions, and then there's still this balancing act as to what information does get stored, and processed, and used, and then what does have to go back to the data center, because it's not a substitute for the data center. It's really an extension of the data center, or maybe the data center is actually an extension of the edge. Maybe that's a better way to think of it, but we've had all these devices out there. Now, suddenly we're connecting them and bringing them into a network and adding control. And I just thought the edge represents such a big shift in the way we're going to see compute change. Probably as fundamental, I would imagine, as the cloud shift has been. >> I believe it is. I absolutely believe it's as big a change in the industry as the cloud has been. The cloud really created scale. It created automation, programmatic interfaces to infrastructure and higher level services. But it also was built around a premise of centralization. I mean, clouds themselves are distributed, and so you can create availability zones and resilient applications, but there's still a sense of centralization. Edge is really embracing the notion that data production is kind of only up and to the right, and the way to scale, processing that data, and turning that data into insights and information that's valuable for a business, is to bring compute closer to data. It's not really a new concept, but the scale at which it's happening is what's really changing how we think about building infrastructure and building the support behind all that processing. And it's that scale that requires automation, because you're just not going to be able to manage thousands, or tens of thousands, or in certain scenarios even millions of devices, without putting automation at the forefront. It's critical. >> Right. And we can't talk about edge without talking about 5G, and I laugh every time I'm watching football on Sundays and they have the 5G commercials on talking about my handset, that I can order my food to get delivered faster at my house, completely missing the point, right? 5G's about machine-to-machine communication, and the scale, and the speed, and the volume of machine-to-machine is so fundamentally different than humans talking voice-to-voice. And that's really this big driver to instrument, as you said, all these machines, all these devices. There's been sensors on them forever, but now the ability to actually connect them, and pull them into this network, and start to use the data, and control the machines is a huge shift in the way things are going to happen going forward. >> Well, it's a couple of things that are important in there. Number one, that data production, and sensors, and bringing compute closer to data, what that represents is bringing the digital world and the physical world closer together. We'll experience that at a personal level with how we communicate. We're already distributed in today's environment, and the ways we can augment our human connections through a digital medium are really going to be important to how we maintain our human connections. And then on the enterprise side, we're building this infrastructure in 5G that when you think about it from a consumer point of view and ordering your pizza faster, it really isn't the right way to think about it. Couple of key characteristics of 5G: greater bandwidth, so you can just push more packets through the network; lower latency, so you're closer to the data; and higher connection density and more reliable connections, and that kind of combination of characteristics make it really valuable for enterprise businesses. You can bring your data and compute close together. You have these highly reliable and dense connections that allow for device proliferation, and that's the piece that's really changing where the world's going. I like to think of it in a really simple way, which is 4G, and the cloud, and the smartphone created a world that today we take for granted. 10 years ago, we really couldn't imagine what it looked like. >> 5G- >> Jeff: Like tomorrow... Excuse me. >> Device proliferation, and edge computing today is building the footprint for what we can't really imagine what we will be taking for granted in 10 years from now. So we're at this great kind of change in inflection point in the industry. >> Yeah. I have to always take a moment to call out a Amara's law. I think it's the most underappreciated law. It's been stolen by other people and repackaged many ways, but it's basically we overestimate the impact of these things in the short term, and we way, way, way, way kind of underestimate the impact in the longterm. And I think your story in they keynote about once you had digital phones and smartphones, we don't even think twice about looking at a map, and where are we, and where's a store close by, and are they open, and is there a review? I mean, the infrastructure to put that together, kind of an API-based economy, which is pulling together all these bits and pieces... (scoffs) The stupid rely... Expectation, right, of performance, and how fast that information's going to be delivered to me. I think we so take it for granted. As you say, I think it's like magic, and we never thought of all the different applications of these interconnected apps enabled by an always-on device that's always connected and knows where we are. It is a huge change, and as you say that when we think about 5G... (chuckling) 10 years from now. Oh, my goodness. Where are we going to be? >> It's hard to imagine? I mean, it really is hard to imagine, and I think that's okay. And what we're doing today is introducing everything that we need to help businesses evolve. Take advantage of that. And that scale of the edge is... It's a fundamental characteristic of the edge, and so automating to manage that scale is the only way you're going to be successful, and extending what we've learned in the data center out to the edge using the same tools, the things we already understand, really is a great way to evolve a business. And that's where that common language and the discussions that I was trying to generate around Ansible as a great tool. But it's not just the tool, it's the whole process, the mindset, the culture change, the way you change how you operate your business that's going to allow us to take advantage of the future where my clothes are full of sensors and you can look through a video camera and tell immediately that I'm happy with this conversation. That's a very different kind of augmented reality than we have today. Maybe it's a bad example, but it's hard to imagine really what it'll be like. >> So Chris, I just want to close on a slight shift, right? We've been talking a lot about technology, but you talk about culture all the time, and really, it's about the people. And I think a number of times in the keynote you reinforced this is about people and culture. And I just had I'm InaMarie Johnson on, the chief diversity officer from Zendesk. And she said culture eats strategy for breakfast. Great line. So I wondered if you can talk about the culture, because it's very different and you've seen it in opensource from Red Hat for a long time, really, a shift in culture around opensource, the shift in culture around devops, and continuous delivery, and "change is a good thing, not a bad thing," and we want to be able to change our code frequently and push out new features. So again, as you think of automation and culture, what kind of comes to mind, and what should people be thinking about when they think about the people and less about the technology? >> Well, there's a couple of things. I'll reinforce what we already touched on, which is the notion of creating confidence in the automation. There's an element of trust associated with that, and that's more maybe trusting the technology. So when you're automating something, you've already got a process. You already understand how something works. It's turning that something into an automated script, or playbook in the Ansible context, and trusting that it's going to do the right thing. There's another important part of trust, which is getting more to the people part, and I've learned this a lot from opensource communities. Collaboration and communities are fundamentally built around trust, and human trust relationships, and the change in process, trusting not only that the tools are going to do the right job, but the people are really... Assuming good intent, and working with they're trying to build for the right outcomes for your business, I think that's a really important part of the overall picture. And then finally, that trust is extended to knowing that that change for the business isn't going to compromise your job, right? So thinking differently about what is your job. Is your job to do the repetitive task, or is your job to free up your time from that repetitive task to think more creatively about value you can bring to the business? That's where I think it's really challenging for organizations to make changes because you build a personal identity around the jobs that you do, and making changes to those personal identities really gets to the core of who you are as a person. That's why I think it's so complicated. The tools almost are the easy part. It's the process changes and the cultural changes, the mindset changes behind that which is difficult, but more powerful in the end. >> Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think people, process, tools... The tech is always the easy part relative to culture, and people, and changing the way people do things, and as you said, who their identity is, how they get kind of wrapped into what they do, and what they think their value is, and who they are. So to free them up from that, that's a really important point. Well, Chris, I always love having you on. Thank you for coming on again, sharing your insight. Great keynote, and give me the last word about AnsibleFest 2020. What are you looking forward to take away from this little show? >> Well, number one, my personal hope is that the conversation that I was trying to sort of ignite through the keynote is an opportunity for the community to see where Ansible fits in the edge and automation, and helping, really the industry at large, scale. And that key part of bringing a common language to help change how we communicate internally is the message I was hoping to impart on the AnsibleFest community, and so hopefully we can take that broader. Appreciate the time here to really amplify some of those messages. >> All right. Great. Well, thanks a lot, Chris, and have a great day. >> Thanks, Jeff. Thank you. >> All right. He's Chris. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCube, and our ongoing coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (twinkly music)

>> Good morning, good afternoon and good evening wherever you are. My name is Robyn Bergeron and I'm very, very, very, truly excited to welcome all of you to this year's Ansible Fest. Whether you're joining us for the first time or if you've attended in the past. It's wonderful to know that you're all out there watching from the office in your home, maybe the makeshift office in your closet or dining room, or maybe even your actual office. Even though I've attended many Ansible Fest in the fast I continue to find to be one of the most educational and interesting events I've ever been to. I hope you do as well. One of the most exciting things about Ansible Fest for me this year is our theme, which can you shared in her opening remarks, automate to connect. As a community architect and as a manager of the Ansible community team. The solitating connections enable our community is most important thing we do every day. And scaling what we can all accomplish together is becoming credibly important, as Ansible become one of the most active open source projects in the world. There's no better example of understanding the growth and the scale of the Ansible community than seeing just how many of you were, we were able to connect with today at our very first virtual Ansible Fest with tens of thousands of folks attending over the course of our time together and even more on their own schedules. We're now actually able to connect with more members of our community than we ever have before. And this statement we are all the community continues to be as true as ever for Ansible. I truly believe that every connection counts I really believe that each and every one of us has the ability to participate in the Ansible community in countless ways, whether it's through code, whether it's through sharing with your friends or coworkers or helping others all over the world. And no matter how big we becomes a community we want to make sure that those connections and your sense of being part of this community to be alive and is full of potential as it always has been. And we want that because that very potential and taking advantage of all of those connections and opportunities is what enables innovation to happen. And we see that innovation happening in Ansible every single day. We all know that open source communities and produce some of the most innovative and most popular software that exists today. But being a community doesn't just come simply by the virtue of being open source, right? And neither does innovation growing the community requires frameworks and enable these connections to exist right between developers and users code and tools. And when we are able to combine those frameworks with opportunities and ideas, that's where innovation can actually flourish and that's the place where the benefits of opensource truly shine. And in Ansible from the very beginning, we strive to ensure that all of those frameworks and ingredients versus such a successful project were present. We made it easy to learn and get started with. We made sure it was at least minimally useful and then it could grow over time. We built the tool itself with a modular plugin architecture that would make it easy to contribute to. In turn, all of those contributions enabled Ansible to become even more useful, connecting audit, connecting and automating even more technologies which then made it useful to even more people. And this, this is really open source innovation at its finest, right? Thousands of users and contributors working together developing feedback loops all going to build software that everybody loves. But doing it well and having some good fortune and timing along the way has also meant that we've gotten fairly large and incredibly active as a community. What this level of scale and more relatable terms that we probably understand since we've all been on video call lately, imagine that you've made something and you would like to get feedback about the thing that you've made. So you invite a hundred people to your video call and you want all of them to provide feedback. Cause you want that feedback, You need the feedback cause you want to act on the feedback. Are you actually going to get that feedback in the phone call? Or the folks that you invited truly feel like they were heard or will you spend the whole call saying I'm sorry, are you trying to talk? Are you, are you on mute? Maybe? Could you make yourself? No, no, not you. The other person you can, you, can you try again? Thanks, for us in Ansible we want to make sure that every voice counts, every contribution matters. Every single bug reported, every improvement and usability, every question answered every word for me Emoji really does count, over its history Ansible had more than 13,000 individual voices speak at least once. And many of those individuals have done so hundreds and some even thousands of times. And for every single connection individual makes multiple automated processes and communications occur fanning out to even more members of our community. And for end users, while we know that adding new ways to automate with Ansible increases its usefulness we've heard that particular folks get more experienced that things like being more selective and flexible in what they choose rather than having all 6,800 modules included for them. The collection concept is the innovative answer to improving our country contributor process and the end user experience and ensuring they'll both scale smarter ways as we move into the future. And it's really more the result of more than a year of work. In a nutshell, collections are a new way to make use of the content that you connect to Ansible modules even roles, and do soar in more dynamic and flexible ways. There's a couple of things that really excited me about collections. So number one, it's easier to contribute to right? collections can live in their own individual repositories which for the Ansible community makes it a lot easier for folks to find and connect with the content that they care about and connect with the users and contributors to that more human scaled community. The second thing, is for users, it's not easier to easier than ever to use Ansible in all the ways that you want to or need to. Since collections can be packaged and made available on their own schedules, you can update them or upgrade them as frequently or as infrequently as you'd like or you can upgrade a more minimal Ansible installation without updating your collection. Now, I know what you're all saying. What do we want? Collections. When do we want it? yesterday. Woo. Well, behold I am super proud to re announce the release of Ansible to Dutch and which arrives in late September. And yes, the collection curated by the Ansible community for inclusion in Ansible are into 2.10. The amazing thing about this release is really the amount of coordination amongst so many points of connection, right? We required changes to our build and release processes extraordinary amounts of work being done under the hood. And it was a significant part of our feedback loop as well. We finished the work on the collections concept but the important thing about two 10 is this as an upstream community that continually develops new technologies. You know, we really see collections as a significant part of the future of Ansible. So getting early feedback on your experiences and using collections is incredibly important to our community. Two 10 is the first release where we're actually able to start broadly gathering an information. And as a part of the process we can hear your feedback a lot better as well now. Now, we all know that this year has been interesting for all of us, right here, I have the 2020 dumpster fire. Yes, it's been the best. We've all had to adapt and change in lots of ways right? At home, at work in public and at school and in the communities that we love. I always like to remind people that contributing code is not the only way to contribute or participate in the community. Our aunts will meet up communities that have been growing in size and membership over the past number of years. We now have more than 260 groups all over the world still looking for that one in Antarctica. Self organizing and creating Ansible content to share in their local communities. This is really an aspect of the Ansible community that I've always loved that so many humans recognize how sharing information in their own local areas collaborating together to teach each other new things helps to improve their own communities for the better. But this year they've also reminded me that humans are incredibly resilient right? We bounce back from life altering situations. We bounce back from, you know, New store, we adapt to new situations and we always form new connections and points of collaboration along the way. A ton of these groups still wanting to share all of their experiences and teach each other together pivoted their meetup groups in a variety of ways. Since March, there've been more than 54 virtual Ansible meetups all over the world. And all those organizers are starting to see the patterns that connect local and not so local meetup members in the best ways whether that's by common language, time zone country rather than a city they're all coming together adapting as best as they can given the year. But for me personally one of the most important lessons that I draw from is a community person over and over again, is that connecting contributors to opportunities isn't necessarily about deciding what I think should be available as opportunities. It's about making that the short doors open for anyone to create those connections and opportunities that nobody had yet started. This year in Ansible, we've seen this in action with the creation of a diversity and inclusion working group which meets regularly to explore all the ways in which we can improve and do outreach and be more inclusive. And the group was also key in our projects work to improve the inclusiveness of our code and language itself, which began many months ago. I can honestly say that all of these activities initiated by all the passionate folks in the Ansible community are things that make me so proud to call Ansible my home. And it really does make me proud to see how much we're maturing as a community. In my role, I've had the privilege of you know, being able to meet and chat with Ansible users all over the world. Sometimes the person, sometimes on the internet one of the discussions I had a few years ago was with someone who was a systems administrator which was a job that I had numerous years ago. So lots of empathy. It was the nineties for me, but anyway, chatted with him and he told me how much he loves Ansible how's finally a tool that he could get started with and be productive with and you know, felt good about it very quickly, he was able to start solving problems. And he told me about all the things that he had accomplished and you know, he'd been able to change things you know, for the better for himself at work for his coworkers and you know, they're actually finally getting ahead. I asked how long they've been using Ansible. And he said, well, you know, it's been about a year but then he also said this, you know, a year ago I wasn't really sure that I could go on at my job. Like, you know, there was so much to do I was, you know, fight fighting fires. I was on call constantly, you know, nothing ever ended I was deep underwater and I was missing out on my family and their lives, you know, all of their milestones. And he said, this year I actually got to go to my daughter's fifth birthday which he had missed her fourth birthday the year before because he was at work fighting fires and he said, you know, Ansible has changed my life I can see my kids again, like on the weekends and you know like a normal person should and you know, hearing stories like that, that's stuff that makes me very proud you know, and humbled to be in this community. And one of the main reasons why I go to work every single day and feel great about what I do and those stories, aren't really all that uncommon it's really our shared love of automation. Our, all of our shared embrace of this universal language and tool that we call Ansible that has helped so many people to improve their personal lives their work lives, their careers you know, the world they're in the world for all of us. And it really truly does connect us in so many amazing ways. It's not just shared code, it's a shared passion and that kind of connection is something that can change our own worlds or the world for all of us. If you're attending Ansible festival live this week I hope you'll take time to connect with others in the event platform to meet all of the other automation users in your community our experts ask questions or share your own experiences. And I hope to bump into you too on the internet and hear your stories about your own connections to automation and the Ansible community. Thank you so much and I hope you enjoy the event.

>> Welcome back to AnsibleFest. I'm Matthew Jones, I'm the architect of the Ansible Automation Platform. And today I want to talk to you a little bit about what we've got coming in 2021, and some of the things that we're working on for the future. Today, I really want to cover some of the work that we're doing on scale and flexibility, and how we're going to focus on that for the next year. I also want to talk about how we're going to help you grow and manage and use your content on the Automation platform. And then finally, I want to look a little bit beyond the automation platform itself. So, last year we introduced Ansible Content Collections. Earlier this year, we introduced the Ansible Automation Hub on Red Hat Cloud. And yesterday you heard Richard mentioned on private automation hub that's coming later this year. And automation hub, Ansible tower, this is really what the automation platform means for us. It's bringing together that content, with the ability to execute and run and manage that content, that's really important. And so what we really want to do, is we want to help you bring Red Hat and partner content that you trust together with community content from galaxy that you may need, and bring this together with content that you develop for yourself, your roles, your collections, the automation that you actually do. And we want to give you control over that content and help you curate that content and build a community around your automation. We want to focus on a seamless experience with this automation from Ansible Tower and from Automation Hub for the automation platform itself, and make it accessible to the automation and infrastructure that you're managing. Now that we've talked about content a little bit, I want to talk about how you run Ansible. Today an Ansible Tower, use virtual environments to manage the actual execution of Ansible, and virtual environments are okay, but they have some drawbacks. Primarily they're not very portable. It's difficult to manage dependencies and the version of Ansible. Sometimes those dependencies conflict with the other systems that are on the infrastructure itself, even Ansible Tower. So what we've done is created a new system that we call execution environments. Execution environments are container-based. And what we're doing is bringing the flexibility and portability of containers to these Ansible execution environments. And the goal really is portability. And we want to be able to leverage the tools that the community develops as well as the tools that Red Hat provides to be able to produce these container images and use them effectively. At Ansible we've developed a tool called Ansible Builder. Ansible builder will let you bring content collections together with the version of Ansible and Red Hats base container image so that you can put together your own images for execution environments. And you'll be able to host these on your own private registry infrastructure. If you don't already have a container registry solution, Automation Hub itself provides that registry. The idea here is that, unlike today where your virtual environments and your production execution environments diverge a little bit from what your developers, your content developers and your automation developers experience, we want to give you the same experience between your production environments and your development environments, all the way through your test and validation workloads. Red Hat's also going to provide some prebuilt execution environments. We want to have some continuity between the experience that you have today on the Ansible tower and what you'll have next year, once we bring execution environments into production. We want you to be able to trust the Ansible, the version of Ansible that's running on your execution environments, and that you have the content that you expect. At the same time, we're going to provide a version of the execution environment, that's just the base execution environment. All it has is Ansible. This will let you take those using Ansible builder, take the collections that you've developed, that you need in your automation and combine them without having to bring in things that you don't need, or that you don't want in your automation and build them together into a very opinionated, container image. If you're interested in execution environments and you want to know how these are built and how you'll use them, we actually have them available for you to use today. Shane McDonald and Adam Miller are giving a talk later with a walk through how to build execution environments and how you'll use them. You can use this to make sure that you're ready for execution environments coming to the automation platform next year. Now that we've talked about how we build execution environments, I want to talk about how execution runs in your infrastructure. So today when you deploy Ansible tower, you're deploying a monolithic web application. Your execution capability is tied up into how you actually deploy Ansible tower. This makes scaling Ansible tower and your automation workloads difficult, and everything has to be co-located together in the same data center. Isolated nodes solve this a little bit, but they bring about their own sort of opinionated challenges in setting up SSH and having direct connectivity between the control nodes and the execution nodes themselves. We want to make this more flexible and easier to use. And so one of the things that we've created over the last year and that we've been working on over the last year is something that we call receptor. Receptor is an overlay network that's an Automation Mesh. And the goal here is to separate the execution capability of your Ansible content from the control plane capability, where you manage the web infrastructure, the users, the role-based access control. We want to draw a line between those. We want you to be able to deploy execution environments anywhere. Chris Wright earlier today mentioned Edge. Well Edge Cloud, we want you to be able to manage data centers anywhere in the world, and you can do this with the Automation Mesh,. The Automation Mesh connects your control plane with those execution nodes, anywhere in the world. Another thing that the Automation Mesh brings is, we're going to be able to draw the lines between the control plane themselves and each Automation Mesh node. This means that if you have an outage or a problem on your network and on your infrastructure, if you can draw a line between the control plane itself and the node that needs to execute, the sensible work, the Automation Mesh can route around problems. The Automation Mesh in the way it's deployed, also allows this to fit closer with ingress and egress policies that you have between your infrastructure. It doesn't matter which direction the Automation Mesh itself connects in. Once the connection is established, automation will be able to flow from the control systems to the execution nodes and get responses back. Now, this all works together with automation of the content collections that we mentioned earlier, the execution environments that we were just talking about and your container registries. All of these work together with these Automation Mesh nodes. They're very lightweight and very simple systems. This means you can scale up and scale down execution capacity as your needs increase or decrease. You don't need to keep around a lot of extra capacity just in case you automate more, just because you're not sure when your execution capacity needs will increase and decrease. This fits into an automated system for scaling your infrastructure and scaling your execution capacity. Now that we've talked about the content that you use to manage, and how that execution is performed and where that execution is performed. I want to look a little bit beyond the actual automation platform itself. And specifically, I want to talk about how the automation platform works with OpenShift and Kubernetes. Now we have an existing installer for Ansible tower that we'll deploy to OpenShift Kubernetes, and we support OpenShift and Kubernetes as a first-class system for deploying Ansible tower. But I mentioned automation hub and Ansible tower as this is what the automation platform is for us. So we want to take that installer and replace it with an operator-based full life cycle approach to deploying and managing the automation platform on OpenShift. This operator will be available in OperatorHub. So there's no need to manage complex YAML files that represent the deployment. Since it's available in OperatorHub, you have one place that you can go to manage deployments, upgrades, backup and restore. And all of this work seamlessly with the container groups feature that we introduced last year. But I want to take this a little bit beyond just deploying and upgrading the automation platform from the operator. We want to look at what other capabilities that we can get out of those operators. So beyond just deploying and upgrading, we're also creating a resource operators and CRDs that will allow other systems running in OpenShift or Kubernetes to directly manage resources within the automation platform. Anything from triggering jobs and getting the status of jobs back, we want to enable that capability if you're using OpenShift and Kubernetes. The first place we're starting with this, is Red Hats Advanced Cluster Management system. Advanced Cluster Management brings together the ability to manage OpenShift and Kubernetes clusters to install them and manage them, as well as applications and products in managing the life cycle of those across your clusters. So what we really want to do, is give you the ability to connect traditional and container-based workloads together. You're already using the Ansible automation platform to manage workloads with Ansible. When using Advanced Cluster Management and OpenShift and Kubernetes, now you have a full system. You can manage across clouds across clusters, anywhere in the world. And this sort of brings me back to one of the areas of focuses for us. Our goal is complete end-to-end automation. We want to connect your people, your domains and the processes. We want to help you deliver for you and your customers by expanding the capabilities of the Ansible automation platform. And we want to make this a seamless experience to both curate content, control the content for your organization, and run the content and run Ansible itself using the full suite of the Ansible automation platform. So the Advanced Cluster management team is giving a talk later where you'll actually be able to see Advanced cluster Management and the Ansible automation platform working together. Don't forget to check out Adam and Shane's talk on execution environments, how those are built and how you can use those. Thank you for coming to AnsibleFest, and we'll see you next time.

>> Welcome. My name is Richard Henshall. I'm a senior manager for product management, for Ansible Automation Platform. Think to yourself, how did you adapt to the changes this year? How was your team forced to adapt? And were you prepared and had you been automating already? Talking for the Ansible team, we're ready to move forward. Now we suspect that sentiment is shared by many of us here. We just had a good lesson in why being able to adapt quickly is so important. The previous ways of working may not always be available to us, and we have to change the way we focus and look at things. And this is why I have such a strong belief in the power that automation can gift us. And if we remind ourselves of what the goal of automation is, and to put it very simply, to perform work with minimal human interaction On one hand, this sounds great, no work. But it can also seem very impersonal. And the reality is automation cannot be achieved without knowledge and experience. Because what needs to be automated is what we learn. So much of what we do is specific to our circumstances, to our business or our own personal backgrounds. So how we approach automation is also important. And that's why this year's message "Automate to connect" is relevant to the times we find ourselves in. As a rhetorical question, and of course, all of these are rhetorical questions. I'm sat in a room at my house, staring at a camera. I would next ask you why we need to connect? And what do we connect for? Do we connect to share knowledge, to learn from others, to work on common goals and objectives? Reality is it should be all of these. Any intent when we connect from our work perspective, needs to be about collaboration. Collaboration is essential when we approach how we deal with change. Because when we talk about change, we often see it explained as people process and technology. But when we're forced to change, the unexpected circumstances, you can't always be prepared. You're not always given the time to plan and prepare the way you'd like. So having a way to connect, to build relationships and to collaborate is more important than ever. Back in the days when I was learning my trade, middleware engineering before the endless video calls, presentations and spreadsheets, the most difficult relationship to improve was between us in engineering and the network team. And it wasn't because of the skills it wasn't because we didn't like each other, at least I'd like to think so. And it wasn't for lack of trying. It's because the network team, they're on a different floor, big security door, magnetic locks, special key cards that you needed to have access for. It was aggressively protected so they couldn't be interfered with. It wasn't this opportunity to build the relationships in the same way that we could when we could go and collaborate with the Linux Windows or storage teams. You couldn't wander off and discuss a problem, just have a chat, they were locked away. Now, maybe they like that and sometimes it's good to be locked away, but it forms a barrier. And it's a barrier to collaboration. And so with this group, collaboration required meetings, it required planning and this made it harder. And when something's hard, it makes it easier not to do it. And additionally, we didn't have a platform to help us. So ask yourself, does that sound familiar to your circumstance? What we needed to connect those relationships and we've seen this time and time again, is that for automation we need a consistent technology foundation to connect. With the foundation encourages simplicity for collaboration foundation to connect the people, process and technology and a foundation to help us build trust in those relationships. If we'd had that foundation, that platform, we could have been successful much faster. 'Cause it's important we understand that success depends on trust between groups. To be successful in adapting to change we need to know we trust when the situation may not be perfect. It might be different offices, could be different countries, probably different languages, maybe even different objectives between these different groups. It might be a global pandemic, which is a phrase I never thought I would say in a keynote, but connecting with your colleagues, collaborating and therefore participating in the work that's done. Working as a wider team, enables you to see a broader perspective. Because how else do we trust? Unless we understand each other. How do we trust what we can create? Who has created it? Is he up to standard? And how do we trust what's running where? And who's been running it that we can scale with the correct control? And how do we trust that we can engage removing friction and complexity. And we can do all these things by being given the opportunity to participate, to be included in the overall process. Ultimately, how do we participate to achieve our goals? And what goals do we choose? Your goals are your business challenges automate what makes both your business and IT successful because participation is key to that process. And the more people you can bring together to connect, the more benefit you can achieve. If we've connected and collaborated, we trust what's being produced because automation can be a selfish act. I, the individual do something to make my job easier, but you should think of automation as a gift of knowledge and experience. How can you automate your job to make your colleagues' lives easier? So as we assume and know that participation enables collaboration, how do we help you to collaborate? Well with Ansible, the language of collaboration. And to collaborate, we need to connect. And for that, we have the Ansible Automation Platform. Everything I've described so far is drawn from our collective experience with customers. When Ansible the tool was released, it started as a way to perform automation in a simpler way. As your needs changed, we added more domains and then your needs changed again. As complexity and scale surfaced, a different set of challenges for us to look after. Not only did you do the automation, you need to do more automation as you achieve some successes. And afterwards you have to manage all that automation. To be successful we have deserved that it's not just what you do, it's how and where you do it. It's not just about the tool. It's about the structure, the framework. A focal point and a user experience in maintaining your automation assets. And this is why we focused all of our product offerings into Ansible Automation Platform, a single offering for enterprise grade automation. We've supported your changes in the past, and we've been working to support your changes for the future, help you adapt and connect. Now, if Ansible is the language of collaboration, collections, Ansible content collections are the building blocks of how you simplify the connection of your trusted technologies. Last year, we launched collections as a way to improve the management of content distributed within the Ansible project and the Ansible products. The teams involved were busy working on making this happen over the last 12 months. Working with our community and partners to migrate over 4000.5 modules. This work including this summer with the Ansible collections, 1.0 release. Last Ansible Fest we unveiled certified platforms with the Ansible certified partner program. End to end support for Ansible content between Red Hat and our trusted partners. We now have over 50 certified platforms focused on curated enterprise technology domains. The platforms that you use and rely upon because connecting these domains is connecting your teams. I'm talking about connecting teams. I'm sure that your planning has started already working on cloud native adoption. Key to that cloud native journey and story are containers. And that brings its own set of changes to the way that we work. And we want to support you as you adapt to these changes. I assume most of you are aware that OpenShift is Red Hat's intuivating container orchestration platform based on Kubernetes. And I'd like to announce the release of certified Ansible content collections of Red Hat OpenShift. Whether it be for augmenting provisioning, customizing cluster nodes, or data operations. Collections gives us the perfect opportunity to deliver these use cases and more. Because we know Red Hat customers have chosen and trust Ansible Automation and OpenShift platforms to drive transformation programs. But the connection between these two platforms and the teams that deliver these has always been very implementation efforts. We know that we need to move away from that implementation effort and move to product integration. The reality of evolving tech is it's never all or nothing. If you're fortunate, you can deploy your cloud native application entirely on OpenShift. But what happens, we need to manage across clusters or access existing infrastructure like networks or databases. We're excited to bridge traditional container and edge through Ansible Automation. Perhaps the only automation and container platform solution that is truly agnostic Ansible just doesn't care whose platform you're running on. The new Ansible resource operator, which we deployed as part of Red Hat advanced cluster management is our answer. We're making the Ansible Automation platform a first class provider inside ACM. To enable call outs to automation assets deployed on the automation platform and to make it easily accessible to container management workflows and connect two industry leading technology platforms. Enabling this integration with our customers to identify and enforce policies, applied governance models consistently across multiple clusters, as a deploy and scale complex applications across hybrid multi cluster environments. In the future, the resource operator will be available for any OpenShift deployed service to integrate to the Ansible Automation Platform. And to find out more about this, be sure to checkout Matt Jones' "Future of Ansible Automation Talk" as well as the ACM breakout sessions. Now, as collections are about connecting technology and product integrations are about connecting process. We still need to think about connecting people. How do we ensure that users can find trusted content? So while many users are happy to get content from Ansible galaxy, we know that many enterprises are far less comfortable with that situation. And certainly not comfortable uploading private developed content themselves. We also know that galaxy isn't the only source of content for you to use. There are other source control, repositories, other locations, perhaps even file shares where you allow your teams to collaborate and connect. With all these different sources it can be hard for your users, your internal communities to connect and trust they're using approved content. So we want to connect teams, help them collaborate, have shared goals and ensure trust in how they automate. We need to fill that gap. And that's why last year we launched the automation hub on cloud@redhat.com. As a trusted source for download downstream certified Ansible content supported as part of ground sports automation platform subscription. And this is where you access the collections for those 50 certified platforms I mentioned earlier. But that was only part one of the plan. So while we can provide a location for trusted content that doesn't bring together content from other sources. Before, I mentioned collections were introduced to help the management of automation content. By adopting collections, you provide a path for automation developers to bring content together in a common location, allow multiple teams to increase their time to value in the automation adoption journeys. But to connect internal communities of practice, we need to provide a focal point for all things related to automation content. And that's why we're pleased to announce that the private version of automation hub will be released to the content and knowledge management component of the Ansible Automation Platform. Your privately hosted location for all your Ansible content, to allow you to curate which content is available from which sources, whether it's from Red Hat, the Ansible community, or develop internally. You now have the control over which content you trust. Finally, this year we launched our third hosted service and no additional cost to platform customers. The automation services catalog. The purpose of this service was to allow you to connect your business users with rules-based governance and a simplified user experience to the automation creator deployed via the platform. We're announcing a tech preview launch with the connected technology security connect to your own prem platform environments. It's based on a technology that's part of our future plans. And again, if you attend Matt Jones' "Future of Ansible Automation Talk", you'll hear more about what we're planning in this area. Because this year has been somewhat challenging, automation and Ansible have become more important to many individuals and organizations. So I could leave you with one set of thoughts to adapt and to change as we face, keep things simple, participate in making automation happen and understand the problems to be solved, but always try and keep it simple. Evolve and scale as you connect your teams, as you would grow and expand your automation, grow and expand the scale you're working at as you move forward. And collaborate to break down the silos and domains that build and build your automation that makes change possible. Whether you're an Ansible expert or someone looking for some way to start, we have sessions we hope will inspire you to make your own changes and sessions that will give you the knowledge of how to adapt for the future. Thank you and happy automating.